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OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

E. F. BENSON 




MY FATHER, JET. 50 



Frontispiece 



OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

1867-1896 

V V BY 

E. y F. BENSON 

AUTHOR OF "DODO," "DAVID BLAIZE," 



WITH PORTRAITS 




NEW XSJT YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



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COPYRIGHT, 1921, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 

PAGB 

Wellington and the Beginning ... 13 

CHAPTER II 
Lincoln and Early Emotions .... 32 

CHAPTER ni 
Lincoln and Demoniacal Possession . . 52 

CHAPTER IV 
The New Home at Truro 62 

CHAPTER V 
Private School and Holidays .... 80 

CHAPTER VI 
The Dunce's Progress 108 

CHAPTER VH 
The Widening Horizons 137 

CHAPTER VIII 
Lambeth and Addington 163 

vii 



viii CONTENTS 

CHAPTER IX 

PAQB 

The Fall of the First Leaf .... 189 

CHAPTER X 
Cambridge 209 

CHAPTER XI 
The Circle Is Broken ...... 237 

CHAPTER XII 
An Arch^iological Excursion .... 255 

CHAPTER XIII 
Athens and Dodo . 276 

CHAPTER XIV 
Athens and Egypt 303 

Index 325 



PORTRAITS 

My Father, aet . 50 Frontispiece 

PAGB 

My Mother, aet. 20 19 

Elizabeth Cooper: "Beth", aet. 78 . . . 69 

E. F. Benson, aet. 19 119 

"His Grace" 169 

"Her Grace" 219 

E. F. Benson, aet. 22 269 

E. F. Benson, aet. 26 287 



OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 



OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

CHAPTER I 

WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING 

MY father was headmaster of Wellington College, 
where and when I was born, but of him there, in 
spite of his extraordinarily forcible personality, I have 
no clear memory, though the first precise and definite 
recollection that I retain at all, heaving out of nothing- 
ness, was connected with him, for it certainly was he, 
who, standing by the table in the window of the dining- 
room with an open newspaper in his hand, told me never 
to forget this day on which the Franco-German war 
came to an end. Otherwise as regards him, somebody 
swept by in an academic cap and gown, a figure not at 
all awe-inspiring as he became to me very soon after, but 
simply a rather distinguished natural phenomenon to be 
regarded in the same light as rain or wall-paper or sun- 
shine. Cudgel my memory as I may, I can evoke no 
other figure of him at Wellington, except as something 
shining and swift; an external object whirling along on 
an orbit as inconjecturable as those of the stars, and 
wholly uninteresting. He had a study on the left of the 
front door into the Master's Lodge, where there was a 
big desk with a shiny circular cover. I know that I was 
taken in there to say good night to him, but the most 

13 



14 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

remarkable thing there was the big desk with large 
handles, and perhaps a boy standing by it, mountainous 
in height and looking extremely polite and gentle. There 
was the same ceremony every evening: my father kissed 
me, put his hand on my head and said, "God bless you 
and make you a good boy always." The most significant 
detail of that ritual was that my father's face was rough, 
not smooth like the face of my mother and of Beth, and 
that there lingered round him or the room a smell of 
books and a smell of soap. 

A little later on than that there came a period when 
for half an hour before bedtime my two sisters and I 
(for the present the youngest) used to visit him in that 
same study while he drew entrancing pictures for us, 
each in turn. One of these I found only the other day : 
it represents a hill crowned with a castle and a church, 
in front of which is a small knight waving his sword in 
the direction of a terrifying dragon, horned and tailed, 
who is flying across the sky. Below in minute capitals 
runs a rhyming legend. Or I went to the College chapel, 
though not often, and by way of a treat, and there 
was the same figure in a surplice, in a stall on the right 
hand of the door of entrance. I believe I was there on 
the last Sunday of his Headmastership and that they 
sang a hymn which he wrote. 

Emotionally, I have no picture-book illustrated with 
memories of my first five years, but externally I have im- 
pressions that possess a haunting vividness comparable 
only to the texture of dreams, when dreams are tumul- 
tuously alive. All these (and I think the experience is 
universal) were external happenings, trivial in them- 
selves, but far more lasting than emotional affairs in later 
life. Never shall I forget, though I have forgotten so 



WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING 15 

much of far vaster import since then, the discovery of an 
adder on the croquet lawn outside the nursery windows. 
The gardener attacked it with the shears that he had been 
using for clipping the edges of the grass: he made fine 
chopping gestures, and presently disappeared into the 
belt of wood with the adder slung on the blades. There 
is the vignette: something terribly vivid but girt about 
with mist. I have no other knowledge of the gardener 
but that he killed an adder with his shears and went into 
the belt of wood with the corpse dangling thereon. 

There was an evening when, having had my bath in the 
nursery I escaped from the hands of my nurse, slippery 
with soapy water, and looked out of the nursery window. 
Then a miracle burst upon my astounded eyes, for, 
though it was bedtime my mother was in the act of put- 
ting her foot on her own croquet ball, and with a smart 
stroke sending the adversary into the limbo of a flower- 
bed. That was allowed by the rule of 1870 or there- 
abouts, and it gave me the impression of consummate skill 
and energy. My mother, you must understand, stood 
quite still with her own ball in chancery below her foot. 
The concussion of her violent mallet sent the adversary 
into a flower-bed, and the calceolarias nodded. . . . 
Then Beth, my nurse, caught me, and rubbed me dry, 
and I went to bed with the delicious sense of my mother's 
magnificence, and the marvel of people still playing cro- 
quet in daylight when I had to go to bed. I think that 
this occasion was the first on which I recognised my 
mother as having a personality of her own. The next 
confused me again, for on some birthday of one of us, 
or at Christmas, Beth told me that Abracadabra was 
coming, and that I mustn't be frightened. I was then 
taken to see my mother, who was lying down in her bed- 



16 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

room, and said that she was very sleepy, and I returned 
to the nursery. Shortly afterwards there was a general 
hubbub in the house, and on being taken downstairs from 
the nursery into the hall, I saw a huge bedizened fairy 
standing in front of the fireplace. She blew a piercing 
trumpet at intervals, and made dance-steps to the right 
and left, i She had a wonderful hat covered with lilies, 
and a dress covered with jewels, and in front of her 
was a- thing that might have been mistaken for the 
clothes-basket out of which Beth took clean shirts and 
socks, but it could not possibly have been that, because it 
gleamed with pure gold. A sheet lay on the top of it, 
and Abracadabra blew her trumpet, and Beth, holding me 
close, said, "Eh, dear, don't be frightened; it's all right!" 
Obviously it was all right; for to put an end to all 
tearful tendencies, Abracadabra, with a magnificent ges- 
ture, withdrew the sheet, and hastily presented me with a 
clockwork train, just what I had always wanted. She 
turned a key in the engine, and the engine then capsized 
with loud buzzings, but when Abracadabra put it on its 
wheels again, it proceeded to draw three tin carriages after 
it. And it was mine, the very thing I had wanted, and 
Abracadabra smiled as she gave it me, and I thought that 
her face was rather like Mamma's. But the likeness 
must have been purely accidental, because Mamma was 
in her bedroom feeling sleepy. And when Abracadabra 
went through the door into the kitchen passage blowing 
loudly on her trumpet, and when, after a few excursions 
of the clockwork train, I was allowed to go up to her 
room again, and found her still sleepy, it might be indeed 
considered proved that she was not Abracadabra. Be- 
sides, when I told her about Abracadabra's visit, she 
was very much vexed that she had missed her, and asked 



WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING 17 

whether Abracadabra had not left any present for her, 
which she had not. That is the first clear and definite 
memory I have of Abracadabra, and also, in a way, it 
is the last, for when next that amiable fairy visited us, I 
knew, alas, that she was no fairy at all, but my mother, 
dressed in the amazing garb of fairyland. But though 
that particular brand of fairyland was finished for me, 
those subsequent occasions were girt with grandeur, for I, 
concealing my own superior knowledge, must pretend 
that this was genuine Abracadabra, thus indulging and 
buttressing the belief of my youngest brother Hugh, who 
still, innocent thing, had no grown-up doubts on the sub- 
ject. ... I found those selfsame garments only lately 
in a trunk stowed away in an attic at the last home my 
mother lived in; a skirt covered with sprays of artificial 
flowers, a bodice and stomacher set with gems of pure 
glass, a hat of white satin embowered in flowers, a pair 
of wings, gauze and gold, and a pair of high-heeled shoes 
covered with gilt paper. They were moth-eaten and 
mouldy, and it was scarcely possible for the most senti- 
mental pilgrim to preserve them. Besides I had the mem- 
ory of the day when the authentic fairy appeared in them, 
and that memory was sweeter than the condition, forty- 
five years later, of the robes themselves. My mother had 
kept them, I make no doubt, when her own days of Abra- 
cadabra were over by reason of our emergence from child- 
hood, in the hope that one day a daughter or daughter-in- 
law would assume them again for the joy and mystifica- 
tion of grandchildren, but that day never came. So the 
robes of fairyland stowed away in their trunk were for- 
gotten, until that day at Tremans when I found them, as 
I turned out the treasures and the rubbish of the vanished 
years before the house passed into other hands. It was 



18 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS ' 

a dark autumn day, and the rain beat softly on the roof, 
but verily, when I opened the trunk and found them 
there, the sunlight of the dawn of life shot level and de- 
licious rays from the far horizon, and cast a rainbow over 
the weeping sky. 

People in those very early days, with the exception of 
Beth, were more part of the general landscape of life than 
human beings, similar in kind to myself, with an individ- 
uality of their own. They were not loved or feared : they 
were but a part of the general environment, like the walls 
of the nursery, or trees or dinner or beds. But, as by 
some superior swiftness of evolution, Beth ceased to be 
landscape, and became a human being, wholly to be 
adored and generally to be obeyed, sooner than any of 
the family. She was well over fifty when first I remem- 
ber her, and had by now almost completed the nursing 
of a second generation, for she had been nursery-maid 
with Mrs. Sidgwick, my mother's mother, when her fam- 
ily came into the world, and had gone to my mother when 
at the mature age of nineteen the first of her six children 
was born. Thereafter Beth remained with my mother 
until the end of her long and utterly beautiful life of 
love and service. Very soon after she came to my grand- 
mother, at the age of fifteen, she gave notice because she 
wanted to go back from Rugby to her native Yorkshire, 
and did not settle into more southerly ways. But my 
grandmother encouraged her to think that she soon would 
do so, and so Beth, instead of leaving, stopped on till the 
age of ninety-three, in an unbroken devotion to us of 
seventy-eight years. That devotion was returned: we 
were all her children, and the darlingest of all to Beth's 
big heart was Hugh. 

Beth t£en, to my sense, emerged first of all into the 




MT MOTHER, vET. 20 



[Page 19 



WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING 21 

ranks of human beings, servant and friend and to a very 
considerable extent mistress. But she gave us no weak 
and sentimental devotion, and though she never inspired 
the smallest degree of fear, her rare displeasure caused an 
awful feeling of loneliness and desolation. If we had 
done wrong, she demanded sorrow before her forgiveness 
was granted, and if to her wise mind the sorrow was not 
sufficiently sincere, she was quite capable of saying, when 
we said we were sorry in too superficial a manner, "I 
don't want your sorrer," and the day grew black, until 
she accepted it and beamed forgiveness. That granted, 
there was never any nagging, and next minute she would 
be running races with us again until panting and bright- 
eyed she would stop and say, "Eh, dear, I can't run any 
more : I've got a bone in my leg." 

She mingles in almost every memory that I have of 
those days, a loved and protecting presence. She it was 
who lifted me up to look out of the nursery window when 
a sham fight was going on, perhaps at Aldershot. There 
were reports of guns to be heard and, so I fancy, flashes 
and wreaths of smoke, and like George III I got it firmly 
embedded in my mind that this was the battle of Water- 
loo that I had witnessed. The connection I think lay 
through the fact of this place being Wellington. She it 
was who led me through a delicious sandy piece of waste 
ground near the house called the Wilderness, and allowed 
me to pick and eat a blackberry from a bramble that grew 
by a rubbish heap on which was a broken plate. Never 
have I seen such a blackberry. I can still hardly believe 
it was not of the size of an apricot, for I know it entirely 
filled my mouth and the juice spurted therefrom as out of 
a wine-vat. She too consoled me for the loss of two front 
teeth which came out into a piece of butter-scotch that 



22 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

she had given me. She removed the teeth and I pro- 
ceeded with the toffee. She too allowed me to take out 
of the Noah's ark with which we played on Sundays a 
brown dog remotely resembling a setter, two of whose 
legs had been broken. Her brilliant surgery had repaired 
this loss by inserting in the stumps a couple of pins so that 
it stood up as well as ever. This I was permitted to carry 
about with me, partly in my pocket, but mostly in a warm 
damp hand, which caused the setter to exude a pleasant 
smell of paint and varnish. A moment of tragedy, the 
first that I had known, was the sequel, and I do not 
believe that ever in my life I have been more utterly 
miserable. What happened was this. 

It was Christmas Eve, and the five of us, Martin, 
Arthur, Nellie, Maggie, and myself — Hugh, so I guess, 
being then little more than a month old — were returning 
from our walk, and the setter should have been in my 
hand or in my pocket. We were going through a wood 
of fir trees, the ground was brown and slippery with pine- 
needles, and the sun low and red shone through the 
tall trunks making, with the fact that it was Christmas 
Eve, an enchanted moment. I had just found out that 
my breath steamed, as it came out of my mouth, and 
Beth and I were playing steamers. Then suddenly I 
became aware that the setter was neither in my hand nor 
my pocket, and the abomination of desolation descended 
on me. For a little while we looked for it, and then Beth 
decreed that we must go on. But Martin — this is the first 
thing that I can recollect about him — being eleven years 
old and able to walk alone after dark, got leave to stop 
behind and look for it, while the rest of the bereaved pro- 
cession went homewards. At that point my memory 
fails, and I have no idea whether he found it or not. But 



WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING 23 

here were the two first crystallized emotions of my life; 
the black misery of the loss of the setter, and the sense 
of Martin's amazing kindness and bravery in stopping 
behind by himself in the terrible wood. There was a 
moon in the sky when we came out into the open and 
frosty stars, but no heart within me to care for playing 
steamers any more that day. 

Next morning, after nursery-breakfast, I went down 
to the dining-room, and was given a cup of milk to drink 
by my father. This was an unusual proceeding, and as 
I progressed towards the bottom of the cup he told me 
to drink slowly. Something inside the cup clinked as I 
finished it, and there was a shilling which was mine. 

On Sunday morning, towards the end of the Welling- 
ton days, I went down to breakfast in the dining-room. 
There were short prayers first, about which I remember 
nothing except the sight of servants' backs, kneeling at 
chairs. But on one such morning, in the summer I sup- 
pose, because all the windows were wide open, a very 
delightful thing happened. There was a tame squirrel 
that used to scamper about the house, and run up and 
down stairs, and on this occasion he suddenly descended 
from a curtain rod, crossed the floor and scampered up 
the cook's back. Probably she pushed him off, for he 
chattered with rage and went and sat on the sideboard 
and began nibbling ham. 

After prayers were over, while breakfast was being 
brought up, it was my task to go round the walls of the 
dining-room, where hung engravings of eminent person- 
ages, and name them. There was the Prince Consort in 
striped trousers with a bowler hat in his hand, the Duke 
of Wellington in knee-breeches, the head and shoulders 
of Dr. Walford, a full length of Dean Stanley, and Dr. 



24 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

Martin Routh in a wig reading a book. Round the edge 
of this which I think must have been a mezzotint were 
various small sketches of the said Dr. Martin Routh in 
other attitudes. Then came the smell of sausages and 
the advent of two or three sixth form boys who in turn 
breakfasted with my father. These were very glorious 
persons and I marvelled at their condescension in com- 
ing. Once the head of the school came, and following 
my father's example I addressed him by his surname 
(whatever it was) without the prefix of "Mister," for 
which omission I was corrected. But out of his mag- 
nificence he did not seem to mind. 

Slowly, as the mists of infancy dispersed through which 
like sundered mountain-tops were seen these scattered in- 
cidents, a more panoramic vision of life as a coherent 
whole made its appearance. There had been vignettes, 
now of the Wilderness, now of my father's study, now 
of the nursery, with nothing except the continuous as- 
sociation with Beth to bind them together. But now 
these scattered localities became parts of one connected 
picture, and I could form some sort of complete idea of 
the place. Most important was the house, the Master's 
Lodge, a red brick building standing in its own grounds. 
You entered through a gabled porch into a broad pas- 
sage, on one side of which lay my father's study. Glass 
doors separated this from the huge immensity of the hall, 
with my mother's sitting-room, the drawing-room and the 
dining-room opening out of it. The stairs started in the 
centre of it and after one flight separated into two, each 
of which led up into a gallery that skirted three sides of 
the hall. Bedrooms opened out of this, also the day 
nursery and night nursery, and pitch-pine banisters (a 
wood much admired at that time) ran round it, and it 



WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING 25 

was through these banisters that one morning my sister 
Maggie, in a fit of wonderful audacity inserted her foot, 
and exclaimed, "That's my foot, Alleluia." In the 
nursery, the room with which I was chiefly concerned, was 
a rocking-horse with wide red nostrils and movable pum- 
mels. These pummels penetrated right through his dap- 
pled skin, and by removing them it was possible to drop 
small objects like pebbles into his inside, where they rat- 
tled agreeably as he rocked. Once some one of us, tempt- 
ing Fate, held a penny at this remarkable aperture, and 
the penny dropped inside, so that Beth had to turn the 
rocking-horse upside down and shake him until it was 
restored to currency again. There was a low deal table, 
quantities of lead soldiers, and a swing hung from the 
ceiling, so that altogether it presented most agreeable 
features. There was also a large cupboard where play- 
things must be put away when they were done with, and 
I remember with excitement a Homeric struggle that took 
place there between Martin and Arthur for the posses- 
sion of a stick which was painted blue and red. But the 
most remarkable feature of the nursery was its walls, 
which, by the time we left Wellington, were entirely 
covered with pictures. These pictures we children used 
to cut out on wet days from old illustrated papers under 
my father's supervision, and he, clad in a dressing-gown 
to defend his clothes from splashes of paste, fixed them 
up on the walls, till the entire surface was covered. He 
had a step-ladder on which he attacked the higher alti- 
tudes, and a roller with which he pressed down the affixed 
pictures to the wall. There were battles there and his- 
torical scenes, notable buildings, and numerous cartoons 
from Punch. But one ought never to have been put there, 
for I dreaded seeing it, and, like a child, kept my dread to 



26 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

myself. It was the outcome, I imagine, of some enquiry 
into sweated trades, and represented a dressmaker talking 
to a client and saying, "I wouldn't disappoint your lady- 
ship for anything," or words to that effect. At the back 
was a glimpse into her workroom, and there falling back- 
wards with closed eyes was a girl, fainting I suppose in 
the artist's intention, but I knew better and was aware 
that she was dead. Nightmares pictured her as falling 
across my bed in the sleeping-nursery next door, and Beth, 
in her frilled nightcap came close and said, "Now, dear, 
go to sleep again. I'm taking care of you." Doors in 
the hall led I suppose to kitchens and servants' bedrooms, 
but of these I remember nothing except the fact of a 
flagged passage and the smell of a store-cupboard to 
which I once went with my mother. That part of the 
house did not matter. 

Outside, the lawn was spread round two sides of the 
house; if you crossed it, you found a wicket-gate in a 
fence that bordered the belt of trees where the gardener 
cast the dead adder, and through this you passed to the 
kitchen garden. On the right of the lawn below the 
trees stood a summer-house where the croquet mallets 
were kept, and through these trees was a path that led 
out into the school playing fields. A gravel sweep faced 
the front door; there were laburnums and rhododendrons 
by the gate, to the right lay the Wilderness and straight 
in front the College buildings with the spired chapel at 
the far end. Somewhere in these buildings was the school 
library, only notable because it contained a glass case in 
which was a white ant. Below the playing fields lay two 
immeasurable lakes, in the lower of which was the school 
bathing-place : the upper, though also immeasurable, was 
smaller, and a waterfall of gigantic height severed the 



WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING 27 

two. By degrees the same world extended even further 
than that, for by walking laboriously you could reach 
either of two hills called Edgebarrow and Ambarrow, and 
then it was time to come home again. 

Simultaneously with this growing reality of the world, 
its inhabitants (still with the exception of my father) as- 
sumed an individuality of their own. Far the most in- 
dividual of them was my mother, who seemed to live 
entirely for pleasure except when she taught us our les- 
sons. She played croquet with consummate skill, she 
drove herself in a pony carriage, she put on a low shin- 
ing dress every evening with turquoise brooches and brace- 
lets, and had as much eau-de-Cologne as she wished on 
her handkerchief. When she was dressing for dinner we 
used to go into her room, examine that Golconda of a 
jewel-case, and bring her clean handkerchiefs of our 
own still folded up, for her to "make moons" on them, 
as the phrase was, with eau-de-Cologne. She took the 
stopper out of the bottle, and reversed it on to these 
folded handkerchiefs, making three or four applications. 
Then we unfolded these odorous handkerchiefs, held them 
up to the light, and lo, they were penetrated with full 
wet moons of eau-de-Cologne. She was, too, enormously 
wealthy, for every Saturday we went to see her in her sit- 
ting-room, and she opened the front of her inlaid Italian 
cabinet, and drew from one of the pigeon-holes within, 
a little wicker-basket, and out of it paid our weekly al- 
lowances. For elders there was as much as sixpence, but 
sixpences came out of a japanned cash-box, for juniors 
there was twopence or a penny according to age, and all 
these pennies, infinite apparently in number came out of 
the wicker-basket. She had a rosewood work-box, lined 
with red silk, which contained what was known as her 



28 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

"treasures." These were two white china elephants with 
gilded feet, a small silk parasol, the ferrule of which was 
a pencil, an amber necklace, a cornelian heart, and boxes 
that made loud pops when you opened them. If any of 
us had a cold, or some ailment that kept us indoors, we 
were allowed to play with her treasures, to while away 
the solitude. But for some reason I did not think much 
of the treasures, and after being consoled with them dur- 
ing an afternoon indoors gave vent to the appalling criti- 
cism, "What Mamma calls tessors, I call 'Ubbish." But 
that, as far as I know, was the only disloyalty of which 
I was ever guilty with regard to her. I just did not 
care about that particular sort of treasures. 

What a life was hers ! She ordered lunch and dinner 
precisely as she chose; she had a silver card-case with 
cards in it, stating who she was and where she was, and 
we all belonged to her, and so in some dim way did my 
father, and even the biggest boys of the great sixth form 
itself touched their caps to her as she passed. And slowly, 
slowly I became aware that she was worthy of all these 
pleasures and this homage. 

There were certainly lessons in those days, I suppose 
for about an hour a day. There was a book called Read- 
ing without Tears, which said that a-b -was "ab," and 
d-o-g was "dog." There must have been certain crises 
over this learning for I was kept in instead of going out 
one day, and, with the fatal habit of inversion which has 
clung to me all my life, said, so my mother told me, "I 
call it tears without reading!" I record this anecdote in 
pure self-condemnation : I don't suppose I knew that this 
obiter dictum made sense; it was only the beginning of 
a habit to play about with words, and see to what fash- 
ion of affairs they could be suited. Every morning also, 



WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING 29 

when we came downstairs we went into my mother's sit- 
ting-room, and learned a new verse of a Psalm, repeating 
the verses previously learned. The Twenty-Third Psalm 
was one of these, and the Ninety-First I think must have 
been another, since I cannot remember the time when I 
did not know it by heart. I do not think that these re- 
ligious repetitions meant anything to me; they were part 
of the inevitable day, which was full of glee. 

That my mother had any other life of her own, full 
as I know it to have been of worries and anxieties and 
of marvellous happinesses, never, as was natural, occurred 
to any of us. She was, as far as concerns my memory of 
her at Wellington, a glorious sunlit figure, living a life 
that appeared to be the apotheosis of hedonism, the 
mistress of a shouting houseful of children, all wilful, 
all set on having their own way, and she calmly ruled 
us all, without even letting us know that we were being 
ruled. All the time she was a very young woman mar- 
ried to a man twelve years her senior who was as violent- 
ly individual as anyone could be. But for us she floated 
there like the moons of eau-de-Cologne which embellished 
our handkerchiefs, carrying something of the fairyhood 
of Abracadabra, and all the wizardry of her own inimit- 
able wisdom. After Beth it was she who first emerged 
out of the landscape which once embraced trees and peo- 
ple alike, and to us soared upwards like a rising constella- 
tion. She could not take Beth's place, for Beth filled 
that, but she enlarged a child's heart, and dwelt there. 
She never ceased from her own enlargements: in my 
mother's house there were many mansions. There were 
mansions for everybody, and none of the tenants usurped 
the place of another. As we grew up, all of us, without 
exception, felt that we were especially hers, and were in 



80 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

a unique relation to her. We were all quite right about 
that, and so were a myriad friends of hers. There was 
"the best room" for each of them. How she did it, how 
she conveyed that adorable truth I know now, because 
I know that love is of infinite dimensions, and has the 
same perfect room for all. But the childish instinct was 
right: she cared supremely, and gave her whole heart to 
each of us. 

My sisters, presently to be kindled for me with a great 
illumination, were for the period of the Wellington days 
quite dim, so too were Martin and Arthur now at a 
private school at East Sheen, where, some years later, I 
followed them, and the rest of the world at that time 
consisted of vague visitors, among whom were my 
mother's three brothers, William, Henry, and Arthur 
Sidgwick (remarkable only for their beards and their 
use of tobacco), and her mother, who is a much clearer 
figure. She encouraged small visitors when she was 
dressing for dinner, was generous in making moons, and 
had a ritual with regard to the dressing of her hair which 
filled me with wonder. It was parted in the middle and 
she drew down two strands of it over the top of her 
ears, and holding each of these in place applied to it a 
stick of brown cosmetic whifch I now know to have been 
bandoline. The effect of this was that the hair stuck 
together in the manner of a thin board, absolutely smooth 
and in one piece. Sometimes a crack or fissure appeared 
it it, and more bandoline was employed. It formed in 
fact a little stiff roof, and on the top she put a lace cap. 
She had long chains round her neck, and carried a silver 
vinaigrette containing a small piece of sponge soaked in 
aromatic vinegar. It was chiefly used in chapel when she 
was standing up during the Psalms. On the other side 



WELLINGTON AND THE BEGINNING 31 

of the family there were three aunts who corresponded 
with the three uncles, sisters of my father, two of whom 
were very handsome and of a high colour; the third, 
Aunt Ada, seemed to me to be like a horse. They all 
floated in a sort of remote ether, like clouds coming up 
and passing again. 



CHAPTER II 

LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 

IN 1873 my father was appointed Chancellor of Lin- 
coln, and the move there was made in the summer of 
that year, during July and August. We four younger 
children, Nellie, Maggie, myself and Hugh went with 
Beth to stay with my grandmother at Rugby while it 
was in progress. That visit was memorable for several 
reasons: in the first place I celebrated a birthday there, 
and great-Aunt Henrietta had no idea that I was long 
past fairies, for on the morning of that day she met me 
in the hall, and said she would go out to see if there 
were any fairies about, for she fancied she had heard them 
singing. Accordingly she went out of the front door, 
closing it after her, and leaving me in the hall. Sure 
enough from the other side of the door there instantly 
came a crooning kind of noise, which I knew was Aunt 
Henrietta singing, and there was a rattle in the letter-box 
in the door of something dropped into it. Aunt Hen- 
rietta then returned in considerable excitement, and 
asked me if I hadn't heard the fairies singing, and of 
course I said I had. One had come right on to the doorstep, 
she continued, while she stood there, and had dropped 
something for me into the letter-box. And there w,as 
a velvet purse with a brass clasp, and inside five shillings. 
This was an opulence hitherto undreamed of. Aunt Hen- 
rietta was remarkable in other ways besides generosity: 

32 



LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 33 

she wore a curious cap with pink blobs on it, and when 
asked how they were made instantly replied that they 
were made by coral insects underneath the sea. It was 
also said of her that she went to church one Sunday with 
a friend, and found they had only one prayer book, and 
that with small print, between them. They were both 
short-sighted and they each pulled so lustily on the prayer 
book in order to see better, that it came in half about 
the middle of the Psalms. 

One day there came a moment which still ranks in my 
mind as an experience of transcendent happiness. It had 
been a delicious day already, for not only had my mother 
arrived, but the ceiling of the dining-room was being 
white-washed, and we had our meals in my grandmother's 
sitting-room, which gave something of the thrill of a pic- 
nic. That evening we were playing in the garden when 
Beth came out to tell us it was time to go to bed. She 
took me along the path, and there close to an open 
window my mother and grandmother were having dinner. 
We stopped a moment, and I asked if I might, not have 
ten minutes more in the garden. That was granted, and, 
as if that was not enough, my grandmother gave me three 
grapes from a bunch on the table. As I ate them a breeze 
brought across me the warm scent of a lilac bush, and 
the combination of these things made me touch a new apex 
of happiness. Something, the joy of the level sunlight, of 
the three grapes, of the lilac scent, of having ten minutes 
more to play in, rushed simultaneously over me, and at 
that moment some new consciousness of the world and 
its exquisiteness was unsealed in me. And I doubt if I 
have ever been so happy since, or if anything, owing 
to that moment, will ever smell so sweet to me as lilac. 

Whatever that unsealing was, the wax was broken for 



34 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

ever, and from then a more vivid perception was mine. 
According to Wordsworth I ought, just about then, to 
have ceased trailing my clouds of glory, instead of which 
they trailed in far more radiant profusion. The arrival 
at Lincoln still wonderfully etched in my memory was 
an adventure of the finest kind, and the exploration of 
the new land teemed with unique discoveries. The fact 
that the house dated from the fourteenth century natural- 
ly mattered not at all : its joy lay in its present suitability 
to the diversions of children. There was a winding stone 
staircase, opening from a nail-studded door in the hall 
with pentagrams carved on the steps to keep off evil 
spirits: there was a day nursery made of two bedrooms 
thrown into one; there was a suite of amazing attics, 
steeped in twilight, with rafters close above the head, and 
loose boards underfoot. Here in dark corners lay water-cis- 
terns which gurgled unexpectedly in the dusk with mirth- 
less goblin chuckles; cobwebs hung in corners and mice 
scuttled. Here too was a bare tremendous apartment 
also under the roof, spread with pears and apples. Up 
one side of it went a buttress, which certainly contained 
the chimney from the kitchen, for it was warm to the 
touch and altogether mysterious. 

Instantly, so it seems to me now, we began playing the 
most blood-curdling games in that floor of attics; people 
hid there and groaned and jumped out on you with 
maniacal screams. A short steep flight of steps led down 
from it to the nursery floor, and how often, giddy with 
pleasing terror, have I tumbled down those steps, be- 
cause somebody (who ought to have been a sister, but 
might easily have become a goblin) was yelling behind 
me. One's mind, the sensible part of it much in abey- 
ance, knew quite well that it was Nellie or Maggie, but 



LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 35 

supposing one's sensible mind was wrong for once? It 
was wiser to run, just in case. . . . From which vivid 
memory I perceive that though I knew about Abracadabra 
I was not so firmly rationalistic about the rooms with 
gurgling cisterns in them. In the dark, strange metamor- 
phoses might have occurred, and when one day I found in 
the darkest corner of one of these attics, a figure apparent- 
ly human, and certainly resembling Nellie, lying flat 
down and not moving (though it was for the hider to 
catch the seeker) the light of my sensible mind was 
snuffed out like a candlewick, and I shrieked out, "Oh, 
Nellie, don't!" Observe the confusion of an infant 
mind ! I knew the corpse to be Nellie, for I addressed 
it as Nellie, and told it not to; on the other hand, by an 
involuntary exercise of the imagination I conceived that 
this still twilight object might be something quite dif- 
ferent. 

My sisters were now of an age to sleep together in a 
large apartment somewhere at the top of the stone stairs, 
while I still slept in the night nursery, in a bed near 
the window. Beth occupied another bed, and in a corner 
was Hugh's crib with high sides, where he — being now 
about two years old — was stowed away before the day 
was over for me. Next door to the nursery was a room 
smaller than any room I have ever seen, and this was of- 
ficially known as "My Room." It had a tiny window, 
was quite uninhabitable, for it was always shrouded 
in a deadly gloom and piled up with boxes, but the fact 
that it was my room, though I lived in the day nursery 
by day, and slept in the night nursery by night, gave me 
a sense of pomp and dignity, and I resented the fact 
that presently my father had the wing of the house which 
lay above the stone staircase connected with the night 



36 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

nursery by a wooden passage across the roof. This turned 
my room into part of the passage, and though he called 
this ten yards of passage "the Rialto," I felt that I had 
been robbed of some ancestral domain. After all it was 
My Room. . . . 

The rest of the house was not particularly interesting; 
it consisted of sitting-rooms and dining-room, and school- 
room and lobbies, the sort of thing that you naturally sup- 
posed would be there. But one day my father presented 
my sisters and me with a room at the top of the stone 
stairs, with which we were allowed to deal precisely as 
we wished. We instantly called it "The Museum," and 
put in it any unusual objects that we obtained. One day 
Maggie found a piece of sheep's wool stuck in a hedge, so 
that of course was brought home, washed white and care- 
fully combed and put in a cardboard box with a glass 
lid. Then (to anticipate as regards the Museum) we 
spent a summer holiday at Torquay, and collected 
various attractive pebbles, and madrepores, and shells. 
These were dedicated to the Museum, and a large earth- 
enware bread-bowl was lined with them, and filled up 
with water to the top, so that they gleamed deliciously 
through the liquid. Then there came a memorable day 
when my mother killed a hornet on her window; she gave 
us the squalid corpse, and after consultation we put it in 
the water of the bowl, lined with spa and madrepore, in 
order to preserve it. It floated about there and was sup- 
posed to be in process of preservation. An addled swan's 
egg joined the collection, which, very prudently, we de- 
cided not to blow. But it began to smell so terribly even 
through the shell that with great reluctance we scrapped 
it. My father gave us a case of butterfles, collected by 
his father, in which, without doubt were two "large cop- 



LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 37 

pers." "As rare things will" that case vanished, and I 
wonder what fortunate dealer eventually got the "large 
coppers." . . . Then on a bookshelf was the great stamp- 
collection, and I wish I knew what had happened to that. 
There was all South Australia complete, and complete 
too was Tasmania, and complete the Cape of Good Hope, 
the stamps of which for the sake of variety were triangu- 
lar. Heligoland was there and the Ionian Islands and 
New Caledonia (black and only one of it). But the 
stamp-collection was considered rather dull: the hornet 
disintegrating in the bread-bowl, and the piece of sheep's 
wool were far more interesting. They had the timbre of 
personal acquisition, and rang with first-hand emotion. 
Personal and precious too were the bits of oxydised glass 
smouldering into rainbows which we dug up in the garden 
and displayed here; there too we found bowls and broken 
stems of tobacco-pipes which I think were Cromwellian. 
But Cromwell was no good to us, so we said that they 
were Roman tobacco-pipes. Then there was a collection 
of fossils, which, with the aid of geological hammers that 
my father gave us, we rapped out of stones in lime quar- 
ries, or from the heaps that lay by the roadside for mend- 
ings. Amateur stone-breakers indeed we were, and often 
bruised fingers were of the party, but they added precious^ 
ness to the trophies that we brought back to the Museum, 
On the door of the Museum was a paper label, on which 
was emblazoned in large letters tinted with water-colour, 
"Museum. Private." The privacy was part of the joy 
of it. Occasionally we asked my mother to have tea with 
us there, and she came in her hat formally. This very 
proper behaviour was duly appreciated. 

Indeed that was a good house for children with its 
attics and its winding-stairs, and its multitude of pas- 



38 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

sages. Judging the virtue of a house by the standards of 
hide-and-seek, than which there is no more authentic 
rule, I never saw so laudable a habitation. Endless were 
the dark places for the concealment of hiders, endless also 
the various routes by which the seekers might get back 
uncaught to the sanctuary where Beth sat with her sew-» 
ing over the fire and said, "Eh now, you'll be falling 
down and hurting yourselves." There was the route up 
the kitchen stairs, the route through my father's dressing- 
room and study, only practicable (as on the days when 
the Khyber Pass is open to caravans) when he was away: 
there were the stairs up from the hall into the lobby; 
there were the winding-stairs communicating through the 
Rialto with the nursery passage, at the other end of which 
were the nursery stairs. How rare again was the cul-de- 
sac, that infernal invention of degraded architects and the 
ruin of all good hide-and-seek, which makes capture in- 
evitable, when once you are in the trap. For magnifi- 
cence of design, judging by these standards, I unhesi- 
tatingly allot the palm to the Chancery house in the Close 
at Lincoln. 

Gardens, in like manner, must be judged by their 
serviceableness in the pursuit of games, and here again 
we were fortunate. Adjacent to the house itself was 
a big lawn, levelled and sown afresh, which was the 
arena of cricket and rounders. Behind that was an 
asphalted yard with a stable, a coach-house and a wood- 
shed, erected no doubt in order that we might play fives 
against them : a covered passage led to the kitchen garden. 
There was sufficient space here for a lawn-tennis court, 
the lines of which were laid down with tape secured by 
hairpins. Occasionally the foot caught in the tape; "zp, 
zp, zp," went most of the hairpins and the shape of the 



LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 39 

court changed for the moment from an oblong to a trape- 
zium with no right-angles. By one side of this was a 
steep grassy bank with elder bushes growing on the top. 
Here you laid yourself stiffly out on the ground, and like 
that rolled bodily down the bank, sitting up again at the 
bottom to find the world reeling and spinning round you. 
When you felt a little less sick, you refreshed yourself 
with elderberries, and rolled down again. Beyond this 
was a pear tree large enough to climb, and high enough 
not to fall out of, and an asparagus bed. The edible 
properties of that vegetable were of no interest, but when 
it went to seed and grew up in tall fern-like stems with 
orange berries it was valuable as a hiding-place. Nar- 
row grass paths led this way and that between the garden 
beds, and they had been well constructed, for they were 
of such a width that it was possible, though difficult, to 
bowl a hoop down them without invading the cabbages. 
A fool would have made them either wider or narrower, 
and then they would have been useless. In a corner of 
the garden were our own particular plots, and against 
the red brick wall grew a fig tree, which I thought had 
some connection with the biblical tree that withered away, 
because it never yielded its fruit. All round the garden 
ran a high wall, now brick, now ancient limestone, and 
at the bottom was a mediaeval tower partly in ruins, where 
we habitually played the most dangerous game that has 
ever been invented since the world began. Why no one 
was killed I cannot understand to this day. The game was 
called "Sieges," and the manner of it was as follows: 
A flight of some twenty high stone steps led up to a 
chamber in the tower, which was roofless and ivy-clad. 
They lay against the wall with a turn half-way up, and 
up to that point had no protection whatever on one side, 



40 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

so that nothing could have been simpler than to have 
fallen off them to the ground. From the chamber a 
further short flight led up on to an open turret defended 
at the top by a low iron railing of doubtful solidity. One 
child was constituted King of the Castle, the others were 
the besiegers. The besiegers stormed the castle and the 
besieger and besieged tried to hurl each other downstairs. 
The besieged had the advantage of superior height, for 
he stood usually at the top of the stairs by the chamber; 
the besiegers the advantage of weight and numbers. You 
were allowed to resort to any form of violence in order to 
win your object, except kicking; blows and pushings and 
wrestlings and trippings-up formed legitimate warfare. 
Even the rule about kicking must have been rather slack, 
for I remember once seeking my mother with a bleeding 
nose, and saying that Nellie had kicked me in the face 
at "Sieges." Her defence, a singularly weak one as it 
still appears to me, was that she hadn't kicked me in the 
face at all: she had only put her foot against my face 
and then pushed. Whereon the judge went into such fits 
of laughter that the trial was adjourned. 

At first my mother taught us entirely, and the sight of 
the schoolroom when lessons were going on would cer- 
tainly have conveyed a very false impression to a stranger, 
for close to my mother's hand lay a silver-mounted riding- 
whip of plaited horsehair. But it was not for purposes 
of correction : its use was that if as we were writing our 
exercises and copies she saw we were not sitting upright, 
her hand would stealthily take up the whip and bring 
it down with a sounding thwack on to the table, startling 
us into erect attitudes again. To these instructions there 
was soon added Latin, and I remember the charm of new 
words just because they were new. It was also interesting 



LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 41 

to grasp the fact that there really had been people once 
who, when they wanted to say "table" preferred to say 
"mensa," and found that their friends understood them 
perfectly. I suppose that soon my mother became too 
busy to continue the instruction of my sisters and me, for 
a day-governess appeared, a quiet melancholy German 
lady with brown eyes, and a manner that commanded re- 
spect. She was not with us very long, and on her de- 
parture we three went to a day-school kept by a widow. 
She had a Roman nose, and though rather terrible was 
kind. She lived in a house just outside the close which 
smelt of mackintosh : the schoolroom was a larger wooden 
apartment built out over the garden. 

In between these curricula we had a temporary gover- 
ness who seemed to us all the most admirable and en- 
viable person who ever lived. This was Miss Bramston, 
a great personal friend of my mother's, whose brother, 
beloved subsequently by generation after generation of 
Wykehamists, had been a master at Wellington under 
my father. Never was there so delightful an instructress ; 
by dint of her being so pleasant when we disobeyed her, 
we soon got to obey her not out of discipline, of which 
she had not the faintest notion, but out of affection, of 
which she had a great deal. She wrote us a play in 
rhymed verse, all out of her own head, which we acted 
one Christmas, rather like Hamlet^ with rhymes thrown 
in, and ending much more comfortably than that tragedy. 
There was a king on a throne, only he wasn't the right 
king and when alone he soliloquized, saying: 

I'm a usurper, though I seem a swell; 
The true King lies within a dungeon cell, 

and I wish I could remember more of it. She painted 



42 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

not in water-colour only but in oils, and could make any 
canvas of hers recognizable. For instance, you knew at 
once that this was the Cathedral. But not only to us 
was she not a usurper but a swell; she was a Public 
Authoress, and wrote stories, printed and published, 
which she gave us to read. The S.P.C.K. published them, 
and the whole world could buy them, and she got paid for 
writing them. One of her early works was Elly's Choice; 
there was a poor good girl called Elly, and a rather nasty 
rich cousin called Cordelia, a boy called Alick, and every- 
body who mattered was about nine years old. A piece of 
stained glass was broken in the "Octagon Room," and 
Cordelia let Elly be punished for it though Cordelia had 
broken it, and then Elly received apologies from Grand- 
mamma Farmer, and Cordelia learned a lesson, and all 
got wonderfully happy again. The extreme vividness 
with which I remember it, surely shows that the book 
fulfilled its purpose, that is, of interesting children. Later 
Miss Bramston spread larger pinions, and I do not think 
she did so well. To our intense joy she came back to us 
at Truro a year or two later, and was as lovable as ever. 
It was in those few years at Lincoln that my father 
began to be individual, instead of being part of the land- 
scape, and as I got to know him, I, like the rest of us, 
also got to fear him. For many years we were none of 
us at our ease with him, as we always were with my 
mother, and it is tragic that it was so, for I know that he 
regarded us all with the tenderest love. Often and often 
his glorious vitality, keener and more splendid than any 
I have ever come across, enchanted us, and the sunlight 
of him was of a midsummer radiance. But he had no idea 
how blighting his displeasure was to small children, and 
for fear of incurring it we went delicately like Agag, at- 



LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 43 

tending so strictly to our behaviour that all spontaneity 
withered. Nothing would have pleased him more, had 
we taken him into our confidence, but we feared his dis- 
approval more than we were drawn to intimacy with him. 
It -was always uncertain whether he would not pull us 
up with stinging rebukes for offences that were certainly 
venial, and in his watchfulness over our mental and moral 
education, he came down upon faults of laziness and 
carelessness as if to explode such tendencies out of our 
nature. Earnest and eager all through, and gloriously and 
tumultuously alive, he brought too heavy guns to bear 
on positions so lightly fortified as children's hearts, and 
from fear of the bombardment we did not dare to make 
a sortie and go to him. Too much noise, an ordinary 
childish carelessness might, so we believed, bring down 
on us a schoolmaster's reproof instead of such remon- 
strances as we got from my mother, which were com- 
pletely successful, and with him we were careful to be 
decorous to the verge of woodenness. We had washed 
hands and neat hair and low voices, because thus we min- 
imized the risks of his society. We were never frank 
with him, we did not talk about the things that interested 
us, but those which interested him and which we thought 
he would wish us to be interested in. We sat on the edge 
of our chairs, and were glad to be gone. If we had been 
natural with him, I know that his appreciation of that 
would somehow have made cement between us, but how 
are you to be natural when, rightly or wrongly, you are 
being careful*? Tearing spirits moderated themselves on 
his approach, we became as mild as children on chocolate 
boxes. If he was pleased with us, we breathed sighs of 
relief: if he was displeased we waited for the clouds to 
pass. With him I, at least, was a prig and a hypocrite, 



U OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

assuming a demure demeanour, and pretending to be in- 
terested in the journal of Bishop Heber of Bombay, 
which I still maintain is a dreary work, and not suited 
to young gentlemen of between six and nine years old. 
But the journal of Bishop Heber was given me as a 
book to read on Sunday and helped to add to the weari- 
someness of that rather appalling day. 

Below our lovely Museum, and opening out of the 
winding stone stairs, there was a room fitted up as a 
chapel. There was stained glass in the windows, Arundel 
prints on the walls, and a quite unique harmonium that 
cost five pounds. The keyboard was only of three oc- 
taves, extending from 



zm 



to 



i 



which, as it was used if not designed to be as an instru- 
ment to accompany hymns, seems to me to be a truly 
remarkable compass, since in order to accompany hymns 
on it at all, you had to leave out the bass, or transfer the 
whole tune to the higher octave. When fully extended 
for purposes of melody, it stood about two and a half 
feet high, but on its black japanned front were two steel 
catches which, if pressed, caused it to subside into itself, 
the foot-bellows becoming flat, and the harmonium itself 
so small that a man could put it under his arm. Some- 
times when playing it (as I was presently to do) a too 
vigorous knee, in the movement of blowing, would touch 
these catches, and it collapsed in the middle of the hymn 
on to the feet of the organist, dealing them a severe blow, 
and necessitating its readjustment before the hymn pro- 
ceeded. It had two stops, one of which allowed the air 



LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 45 

to get to its pipes, the other was a tremolo which caused 
its voice to be transformed into a series of swift little 
bleats with pauses in between like a soprano lamb much 
out of breath. Perhaps it was designed to take the solo 
part of a flute in one of those curious bastard orchestras 
on which Mr. Oscar Browning, with the help of three 
undergraduates, used to render quartettes in his rooms 
at King's College, Cambridge, but here it was as an ac- 
companying instrument at prayers in the chapel of the 
Chancery, and took its part in the religious exercises of 
the morning. 

Sunday, in fact, began in the chapel for us children 
after the early service for our elders in the Cathedral. 
There was a hymn, my father read certain Sunday pray- 
ers, and then came breakfast. The collection of hymns 
which we used in chapel was Bishop Wordsworth's "Holy 
Year." There are many admirable hymns in it, others 
not so good. For instance, the one for the feast of St. 
Philip and St. J^res began: 

Let us emulate the names 
Of St. Philip and St. James. 

We children, therefore, could hardly help making up 
another hymn for the feast of St. Simon and St. Jude 
beginning (and then stopping) : 

Let us try to be as good 
As St. Simon and St. Jude. 

Matins at the Cathedral was at half-past ten, so we 
often bore a crude sausage there, as Juvenal would have 
said. The service was fully choral, and the piece de re- 
sistance, as far as I was concerned, was the Litany, 
chanted by two lay-clerks at a desk in the middle of the 



46 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

gangway between the seats. Together I think (or per- 
haps separately, while the other was in reserve) they 
chanted the first sentences as follows: 



I 



i: 



W 



mt 



Oh, God, the Fatter of Heaven, Hare mercy upon as miser - a - bit tinners. 

The choir then repeated it in harmony, and the same 
simple musical material furnished the whole of the sub- 
sequent responses. 

Sung thus very slowly the Litany took a full quarter 
of an hour, but when that was over, I was at liberty to 
find my hat and steal out. I used to put my hat, a round 
soft felt hat with elastic under the chin, in an aperture 
at the corner of our seat below the stalls, which had in 
it an opening for ventilation. Sometimes my hat slipped 
down this, and after an excited groping for it, it came up 
covered with the dust of ages. The service had already 
lasted an hour or more, and I made my jaded way back 
to the Chancery, while my mother and sisters, and in the 
holidays, my two elder brothers, remained for the rest of 
the service. Martin and Arthur occupied stalls near my 
father and were still dim figures to me, at home only for 
a comparatively few weeks in the year, and having a sit- 
ting-room of their own. I used to be rather glad when 
they went to school, because my mother invented for me 
the title of "The Eldest Son at Home," which could only 
be used in their absence. 

In the afternoon there was a family walk, and then 
Cathedral service again. Then came a reading of Sun- 
day books, or a reading of the Bible with my father, and 
we went utterly fatigued to bed. It was not so much 



LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 47 

the plethora of religious exercises that caused this lassi- 
tude, but the entire absence of any recreation. Spare time 
(and there was not much of it) was supposed to be taken 
up with Bishop Heber's Journal, Agathos and The Rocky 
Island. Once a certain brightness came into these Sun- 
day readings, because we were allowed a book called 
Sunday Echoes in Week-day Hours. There was a widowed 
mother in it, and her boy called Cecil, and their con- 
versation about collects was so excruciatingly pious that 
it became merely humorous, and we invented fresh Cecil- 
talk among ourselves. We once indulged in this before 
my mother, who with a controlled countenance withdrew 
the delightful volume. I remember waking up after fall- 
ing asleep one Sunday night, and hearing Compline going 
on in the chapel with another hymn, and thinking with 
amazement that they were still at it. In the way of a 
child, I think I was, from certain evidence that will ap- 
pear, religious, but to put it quite frankly, I was sick of 
the whole affair by Sunday evening. 

I cannot chronologize the events in our life at Lincoln, 
which only lasted for three and a half years, and I do 
not quite know when the Cathedral services began to wear 
a perfectly new complexion for me. The reason of this 
was that I was violently attracted by a choir-boy, or 
rather a chorister, one of four, who instead of wearing a 
surplice like the common choir-boy, wore a long dark 
blue coat down to the knees faced with white. A similar 
experience, I fancy, is almost universal : the first romantic 
affection a girl is conscious of is nearly always towards, 
a girl, and in the same way, a small boy, when first his 
physical nature begins to grope, still quite blindly and in- 
nocently, in the misty country of emotion, is pretty cer- 
tain to take as his idol for secret romantic worship, one 



48 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

of his own sex. It was so at any rate with me, and in- 
stead of the Cathedral services being of incomparable 
tedium, they became exciting and exalting. He, the 
nameless he, came in procession at the end of the choir- 
boys just before the lay-clerks, and besides having this 
soul-stirring effect on me, he woke in me, by means of 
his singing, my first love of music. He sat at the end of 
the choir nearest our seat, and luckily on the other side, 
so that I could see him without the intervention of dull 
people's heads. I could hear his voice, sexless and un- 
emotional, above the rest of the trebles, but with what 
emotion did that voice inspire me! He used to sing 
solos as well, and I am sure that the sneaking love that 
I have still for Mendelssohn, was due to the fact that 
(unaccompanied) he sang "The night is departing, de- 
pa-a-art (A in alt) ing." I would have welcomed the in- 
terminable Litany becoming literally interminable, so 
long as he continued singing, "We beseech thee to hear us, 
Good Lord," with his chin a little stuck out, and his eyes 
roving about the pews. Sometimes I thought he saw me 
and noticed me, and then my imagination took wings to 
itself, and I saw myself meeting him somewhere alone, 
him in his chorister's cope. What we should have to 
say to each other, I had not the smallest idea, but we 
should be together, and there lay completion. It was due 
to his unconscious influence that I began to sing loudly 
in the chapel at the Chancery, and never shall I forget my 
father once saying to me, "Perhaps some day you will 
sing an anthem in the Cathedral." That supplied a fresh 
imaginative chapter to my secret book; I should be a 
chorister too, and sit next the idol, and we would sing 
together. I was not egoistic in this vision: I had no 
thought of ravishing the world by the beauty of my 



LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 49 

voice: it merely became a sunlit possibility (after all my 
father had said as much) that I should sing in the Cathe- 
dral. But I knew, though he did not, that I should be 
singing with the chorister. Thanks to my idol, Sunday 
became, as long as this passion lasted, a day in which joy 
watered the arid sands of Bishop Heber's Journal, and 
made it, literally, "break forth into singing." That emo- 
tion, the fulfilment of which was brought into the realms 
of possibility by my father's remark, touched such re- 
ligion as I had with ecstasy, and I added to my prayers 
the following petition, which I said night and morning. 

"O God, let me enter into Lincoln Cathedral choir, 
and abide there in happiness evermore with Thee !" 

Who "Thee" was I cannot determine: I believe it to 
have been a mixture of God and the chorister, and, I 
think, chiefly the chorister. 

This quickening of emotion gave rise to a sort of wak- 
ing vision in which I used then consciously to indulge, 
promising myself as I undressed for bed a night of Holy 
Convocation. Two minutes of Holy Convocation were 
about the duration of it, and then I went to sleep. There 
was a hymn in the "Holy Year" in which there were 
lines 

To Holy Convocations 
The silver trumpets call, 

and with that and the chorister as yeast, there used to 
bubble out, when I had gone to bed, this curious waking 
vision. I would not be asleep at all, but with open eyes 
I distinctly saw against the blackness of the night nursery 
a line of golden rails, very ornamental, before which I 
knelt. There was the sound of silver trumpets in my 
ears, there was the sound of the chorister, anthems in the 



50 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

Cathedral, and the presence of God. But all these things 
were secret and apart, never told of to this day, and 
they did not in the least interfere with wrestlings in 
the tower, and violent games of rounders and the pleas- 
ing terrors of hide-and-seek. The shrine usually stood 
shut, but when it opened it disclosed blinding splendours. 
The Cathedral had, apart from the chorister and the 
services, certain pains and pleasures of its own. Oc- 
casionally assizes were held in Lincoln, and then on Sun- 
day the judges would attend in robes of majesty with full 
wigs falling on to their shoulders. They walked in pro- 
cession up the choir, and, reaching their seats, turned 
round awful pink clean-shaven faces of eternal calm, 
awful mouths that pronounced death-sentences. Once to 
my knowledge there was a murder-trial at Lincoln and a 
man condemned to death and the judge on that occasion 
became more terrible than death itself, and I slunk out 
after the Litany with apprehension that I should be 
called back, and hear some appalling sentence pronounced 
on me. Again, one day, a canon of the Cathedral stepped 
backwards through a skylight and was killed and Great 
Tom, the big bell in the central tower, tolled for the 
funeral. But the whole circumstances of that were so 
interesting that, though terror was mingled with them, 
they were more exciting than terrible. Wholly delightful 
on the other hand was a scientific demonstration that took 
place in the nave. A long cord was hung from one of 
the arches, to the end of which depended a heavy lead 
weight. On the pavement beneath it there was marked 
out a circle in white chalk, and this pendulum was then 
set swinging. As the hours passed, it swung in a different 
direction from that in which it was started, and instead 
of oscillating up and down the nave it moved along the 



LINCOLN AND EARLY EMOTIONS 51 

transepts, thus demonstrating the motion of the earth. 
Why that delightful piece of science was shown in the 
Cathedral I have no idea; certain it is, however, that my 
mother took me to see the pendulum after breakfast one 
morning and again before tea when it was swinging in 
quite another direction. I never had any doubts about 
the rotary movement of the earth after that, nor, as far 
as I can remember, before. 



CHAPTER III 

LINCOLN AND DEMONIACAL POSSESSION 

THOSE three and a half years at Lincoln appear to 
have lasted for decades, so eventful was the un- 
folding of the world, and all the years which have passed 
since then, with their travels to many foreign lands, and 
climbings of perilous peaks, seem to have contained no 
exploration so thrilling as the revelation of Riseholme, 
where lived Bishop Wordsworth of Lincoln, who wrote 
the "Holy Year," and his wife, and his family and 
Janet the housekeeper. (The latter, like Mrs. Words- 
worth, had ringlets down the sides of her face, and dis- 
pensed Marie biscuits and cowslip wine in unstinted pro- 
fusion.) The family, too, were interesting, for one daugh- 
ter when she laughed said, "Sss-sss," and another, "Kick- 
kick-kick," and the Bishop himself had a face like a lion, 
and a hollow ecclesiastical voice. My sisters considered 
him very formidable, but I was not afraid of him, chiefly 
because at an early stage of our acquaintance he gave me 
an ink-bottle of pottery, with a gilded lion (like him- 
self) on top of it, and a receptacle to hold sand for the 
blotting of your letter, if you had managed to write it. 
This argued an amiable disposition, and when I came in 
contact with him, I was conscious of no embarrassment. 

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan 
A stately pleasure-dome decree, 

but Xanadu was nothing to Riseholme for domes and 

52 



DEMONIACAL POSSESSION 53 

stateliness. There were two lakes peopled with dace and 
water-lilies and pike and swans, and an island where the 
swans nested, and a sluice, around which the water was 
of fabulous depth, where we fished for dace. There was 
a boat-house, on the roof of which in the autumn a great 
chestnut tree used to shed its fruit, bursting the husks, 
and disclosing the shiny brown kernels ; and at Riseholme, 
as far as I remember, we were allowed to do precisely 
as we pleased. We used to go out alone in the boat, with 
paste for bait, and splash the water at each other, and 
come home with a couple of dace, dirty and wet and 
hopelessly happy. Swans used to scold and hiss at us, 
the boat did everything but capsize, and seons of bliss 
were our portion. There were water-snails to be col- 
lected, if the fish would not bite (they seldom did), and 
wreaths of stinking water-weed, and broken fragments 
of swan eggs lined inside with a tough kind of parch- 
ment, which we called "swan-paper." Then dace (when 
there were any) were cooked for tea, and provided a bony 
mouthful for one; the swan-paper was taken home for 
the Museum, together, on one glorious occasion, with the 
addled swan's egg; and the wreaths of stinking water- 
weed were laid out on sheets of cartridge-paper and 
pressed. This pressing resulted in an awful fricassee of 
weed and paper, and then something else occupied us. 
On the banks of the lake, at intervals, appeared a sympa- 
thetic Bishop with daughters, to whom we shouted the 
results of our explorations, and one of the daughters said, 
"Kick-kick-kick," and another, "Sss-sss-sss." For larger 
people, such as Arthur, there was more grown-up fishing, 
and once with a spoon-bait he caught a pike that weighed 
three pounds. But not even the sympathetic and com- 



54 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

bined appetites of the juniors could finish that toothsome 
dish. 

Then there were expeditions into the vast forest that 
lay below the sluice, where marsh-marigolds grew, and 
the willow shoots flew back and slapped the faces of 
those who followed the leader in these excursions. 
Maggie and I formed a small club or society (I suppose 
Nellie was too old then, being about eleven) to get lost 
in this pathless place, but we never quite succeeded in 
doing so. Just as we thought there was no hope of our 
ever being discovered, in which case we proposed to live 
on leaves and drink the water that came from the sluice 
in a small stream, Beth's voice would sound quite near at 
hand, or, by mistake, we came back into the meadow be- 
yond the lake, or into the path that bordered it. So in- 
stead, we collected chestnuts, if there was not a marine 
or lacustrine expedition, and ground up the kernels into a 
nutritive powder, or mixed it with lake-water to form a 
paste. About this time Maggie and I formed a special 
alliance, which continued till the end of her life, and the 
light of it was never quite obscured by those dusky years 
of darkened mind through which her way led, for she 
was always willing to talk of the days at Lincoln, and 
the collections and the amazing stories which we invented 
to beguile our walks. They were compounded of strange 
adventures, with the finding of gold and immense 
diamonds, of desert islands and bandits, and the central 
figures were she and I and the collie, Watch. All was 
coloured with the vividness of dreams, and the serious- 
ness of childhood. 

Riseholme was about two and a half miles from Lin- 
coln, and the most exciting experience I ever had in its 
connection was that of being sent over there by my father 



DEMONIACAL POSSESSION 55 

with a note for the Bishop. I took Watch with me, and 
"Kick-kick-kick" and "Sss-sss-sss" were so entertaining 
and the Bishop so long in writing his answer that it was 
nearly dark before, with sinkings of the heart, I started 
on my return. "Sss-sss-sss" I think offered to accompany 
me till I got out of the loneliness of the road and in touch 
with the lights of Lincoln, but I was too cowardly to say 
I was afraid of the darkness and the emptiness, and 
started off alone. Wanting to get it over as quickly as 
possible, I ran, and was frightened at the noise of my 
running. Then, one after the other, my stockings came 
down, and I thought that the strip of whiteness would 
encourage highwaymen to attack me, and so had to stop 
every third step to pull them up. Then I talked to Watch 
in order to hearten myself, saying, in so many words, 
"Watch, aren't we benighted?" (new word) and then 
was frightened at the sound of my voice in the frosty 
stillness. But there was pleasure in this sense of ad- 
venture, and I was given an egg for tea. 

There were expeditions to Nocton, where in a wood 
of vast extent the whole ground was white with lilies of 
the valley growing wild, and the still languid air beneath 
the trees swooned with the scent of them, which, I am 
told (though never since that day have I been able to 
believe it), is extremely pleasant. For the last of these 
expeditions to Nocton had a tragic sequel so far as I 
was concerned. We had lunch there after picking lilies 
all the morning, and I suppose I ate too much, and it 
began to rain as we drove homewards so that the car- 
riage, full of hot children and lilies of the valley, had to 
be closed. The effect was that I was exceedingly un- 
well and never since that day have been able to dissociate 
the smell of lilies of the valley from being sick. To 



56 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

balance that bilious day was a glorious expedition to 
Skegness, where I saw the sea for the first time, and fell 
in love with it with a devotion that has never wavered. I 
took with me a small black handbag in which to stow 
the treasures of the shore, among which I rather mis- 
takenly selected a dead decaying skate. An odour as 
unpleasant to others as was that of lilies of the valley to 
me filled the railway carriage on the return, which was 
eventually traced to my bag, and the dead skate which 
would have looked, anyhow, interesting in the Museum, 
was thrown out of the window. That first impression 
of the sea was confirmed by summer holidays spent at 
Torquay, and it was there, I think, that I must have 
learned to swim, and then have forgotten that I knew 
how. For when some years later I went to Marlborough 
and began to learn in the school bathing-place, I in- 
stantly did swim, and the old instructor who sat with 
small boys in a strap at the end of a fishing-rod, said 
with disgust, "Why you swims already!" Torquay was 
responsible for a whole host of further activities, for it 
was there, I believe, that we began those scribblings 
which subsequently developed into the Saturday Mag- 
azine (an industry so important that it must presently 
have a paragraph to itself) and it was certainly there 
that there were hot twisty rolls for breakfast which were 
only to be obtained by reciting some sort of rhyme, of 
which one of my mother's seemed to me to touch the high- 
water mark of inspired wit and poetry. This ran: 

Bread is the staff of life, the proverbs say, 
So give me of its twisted staff to-day. 

Surely that was far better than a miserable effusion by 
Bishop Temple, of Exeter, who merely said : 



DEMONIACAL POSSESSION 57 

An egg, 
I beg, 

and was sycophantically applauded by the grown-up 
people present. You could have eggs without making 
rhymes . . . but perhaps he didn't understand, and any- 
how it was no use wasting time over him. There, among 
the diversions of Torquay we all violently embraced the 
career of artists, and drew miles of cottages and churches 
and painted leagues of the English Channel. The shell 
collection was started then, so also collections of wild 
flowers, and there was bathing and Devonshire cream, 
and a steep garden with gladioli and aloes in its beds. I 
think my birthday must have been celebrated there, for 
certainly I received a present of a terra-cotta teapot with 
lines of blue enamel on it, after receiving which it was 
difficult to imagine circumstances that could have the 
power to hurt one ever again. 

Never can I sufficiently admire or be sufficiently thank- 
ful for the encouragement my father and mother both 
gave to these multitudinous hobbies, for hobbies, as they 
well knew, whether literary, artistic, or scientific, are 
a priceless panacea for the preservation of youth, and the 
stimulation of the world-wonder of beauty. At this time 
we were all of us draughtsmen, ornithologists, concholo- 
gists, geologists, poets, and literary folk: we all drew and 
wrote and collected shells and birds' eggs, and smashed 
stones in order to discover fossils. I claim no measure 
of eminence or even promise in any of us, but that is not 
the point. The point is that under parental encourage- 
ment we did all these things with extreme zest and in- 
terest. In sports and games my father gave us less sup- 
port, for he looked on them only as a recreation which 



58 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

would enable the mind to get to work again, and as hav- 
ing no intrinsic value beyond what a brisk walk could 
have brought. But we had enough keenness among our- 
selves for these, and a ball and something to hit it with 
filled the rest of the vacant hours with ardour. For music, 
among the arts, he had likewise no sympathy at all: he 
liked the singing of Psalms and Handel and hymns en- 
tirely because of the words, and when he joined in the 
hymns in chapel, he produced a buzzing noise that bore 
no relation to any known melody. By this time my own 
love of music, sown in me by the adored chorister, had 
taken firm hold, and with help from my mother to start 
me, and an elementary book of instruction, music became 
to me a thing apart. I wanted no companionship or 
sympathizer in it, and though as far as execution on the 
piano went I was leagues behind my sisters, I felt certain 
in my own mind that I had opened a door for myself into 
a kingdom to which they did not really penetrate though 
they could execute (both counting very loud) Diabelli's 
Celebrated Duet in D which I considered below contempt, 
though it was very clever of them to move their fingers 
so fast. At that time my mother, who had always an 
Athenian disposition with regard to the joy of a new 
thing, went in for a course of instruction somehow con- 
nected with Dr. Farmer of Harrow. There was founded 
at Lincoln a Farmer Society of some kind, and the ladies 
met once a week or thereabouts and played easy Bach 
to each other, and one of the most rapturous Lincoln 
days was a certain wet afternoon, when the Society met 
at the Chancery. My sisters and I were allowed to sit 
in the window-seat, provided we remained quiet, and 
we all had acid drops to suck, and books to read when 
we got tired of listening. They were soon deep in Little 



DEMONIACAL POSSESSION 59 

Women and Good Wives, but for me, in spite of a tooth- 
ache, I listened in an entranced bliss to a series of 
Gavottes and Sarabands and Allemandes, while the rain 
beat on the windows, and the melodious dusk gathered. 
The time of the year must have been near Christmas, for 
I feel as if I went straight from there to the nursery, on 
the floor of which was laid out a large sheet piled with 
holly and laurel and ivy, out of which we made wreaths 
for the doors. The remaining leaves, when all was done, 
were put in the fire and roared and crackled up the chim- 
ney, filling the room with an aromatic smell of burning, 
that ranks next in preciousness of recollection to the smell 
of lilac. 

It was in this last year at Lincoln that I had a fit of 
demoniacal possession, for I committed three heinous 
crimes one after the other. On a shelf in the drawing- 
room with Dresden figures and vases there was an Easter 
egg which had been sent to my father. It was decorated 
with a cross and a crown and a halo and some flowers, 
and was without doubt a goose's egg. This trophy was 
singularly sacred, and my father had told us that we 
were never to touch it. Because of that prohibition I wet- 
ted my finger and rubbed off a piece of the crown and the 
halo. I followed this up by stealing a quantity of sugar 
from the tea-table in a yellow box which I think had 
contained sweetmeats, and kept it on my knees under the 
table-cloth. I suppose I then forgot about it and, get- 
ting up, I caused it to fall to the ground, and spill its 
contents all over the floor. 

The third piece of devil work was far more daring and 
inexplicable. I had a cold one day and was not al- 
lowed to go out, but was left instead by the fire in the 
sjtting-room belonging to my two elder brothers, There 



60 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

was a white sheepskin nig in front of it, and as soon as 
my father with the four eldest children had left the 
house, I ladled the whole of the burning coals out of the 
grate and put them on the hearthrug. An appalling 
stench arose as the wool caught fire; the place was filled 
with smoke, and I left the room, quite impenitent and 
merely interested to know what on earth would happen 
next. The smoke must by now have penetrated to the 
rest of the house, for I met my mother running down- 
stairs, and she asked me if I knew what that smell was. 
I told her that I didn't, and went up to the nursery. 
Presently, having extinguished the fire, she followed me, 
and again asked me if I was sure I didn't know anything 
about it. Upon which I told her that it was I who had 
emptied the fire on to the rug. A fine spanking followed, 
which I did not in the least resent, and I was told to go 
to bed till I was sorry. I never was sorry — for it was 
demoniacal possession — but I suppose that some time I 
must have got up again. 

Friendships had sprung up between us and other chil- 
dren at Mrs. Giles's day-school, and among these was 
May Copeland, who was Nellie's particular friend, and 
told us that she was descended from Oliver Cromwell. 
This was very distinguished, and I fully meant to marry 
her. There was also a girl whose name I forget, and she 
was responsible for one of the greatest surprises of my 
young life, for one day while she and I were looking 
for a tennis ball in the bushes, she took my hands and 
drew them upwards against her bosom. I found to my 
astonishment that instead of being flat, she had two 
swellings there, and I asked her if they were bruises. She 
seemed rather offended and said that they certainly were 
not. Then there was Willie Burton to whom I told, in 



DEMONIACAL POSSESSION 61 

the spirit of bravado, what I had done to the sheep- 
skin hearthrug, and he thought it very magnificent. He 
used to get phosphorus matches from his father's table, 
which was grand, for we only used Bryant and May's 
safety matches, and our great game was to retire into 
the blackness of the tool-house, wet the palms of our 
hands, and rub on the phosphorus which glowed with a 
mysterious light. He had an awful story which I en- 
tirely believed of an aunt of his on whom a practical 
joker played a dreadful trick, for he wrote up in phos- 
phorus above his aunt's bed the text, "This night shall 
thy soul be required of thee." On which his poor aunt 
went raving mad, and I got a general distrust of phos- 
phorus. . . . Willie Burton was dressed in sailor clothes, 
and I in a short jacket and knickerbockers, and one day 
with a sense of almost excessive adventure, we undressed 
in the tool-house and each put on the other's clothes. 
We then opened the door in order to let daylight behold 
this transformation, and swiftly changed back again. 
That was a wonderful thing to have done, and when we 
met next day at the gymnasium we looked at each other's 
clothes with glances of secret knowledge. 

My final remembrance at Lincoln is perhaps the most 
vivid of all, for the sense of it was not that of a momen- 
tary impression, but of a growing reality. Every eve- 
ning now we came down to my mother's room and for 
half an hour before bedtime she read Dickens aloud to 
us, sitting in front of the fire. She liked to have her 
hair stroked, so I used to stand behind her chair, passing 
my fingers over the smooth brown hair above her fore- 
head, and listening to the story of the Kenwigses. Her 
voice and the contact of my fingers on her hair wakened 
in me the knowledge of how I loved her. 



CHAPTER IV 



THE NEW HOME AT TRURO 



ONE morning a most exciting bomb-shell exploded 
in the Chancery and blew Lincoln into fragments. 
It came in the shape of two letters, one from the 
Prime Minister, Lord Beaconsfield, offering my father the 
Bishopric of the newly created see of Truro in Cornwall, 
the other from Queen Victoria, saying that she personally 
hoped that he would accept it. These letters must have 
arrived a few days before we knew of them, for that day 
my father told us that he had thought it over and had 
settled to go. I felt nothing whatever except wild de- 
light and excitement, unmingled as far as I am aware, 
with any regret for leaving Lincoln, and all the time 
that we were out for our walk that morning Maggie and 
I, instead of telling each other stories, whispered with 
secret smiles, "The Lord Bishop of Truro! The Lord 
Bishop of Truro !" We were vastly proud of my father, 
and thought it most sensible of Lord Beaconsfield and the 
Queen to have selected him.* 

The fresh move came in the spring of 1877, and in 
that loveliest of all seasons the train slid one evening 
across the tall wooden viaducts with the lights of Truro 
pricking the dusk, where the town lay below, and the 
enchantment of Cornwall instantly began to weave its 

* Lord Beaconsfield seems to have been as pleased as we were at my 
father's accepting the bishopric, for he wrote exultantly to a friend, say- 
ing, "Well, we have got a Bishop." 

62 



THE NEW HOME AT TRURO 63 

spell. The new home was the Vicarage of Kenwyn, a 
small village high on the western hills and perhaps a 
mile from the centre of the town. As a house it was 
not comparable for amenities and mysteries with the 
Chancery of Lincoln, but what was the garden at Lin- 
coln, for all its towers and rolling banks, in comparison 
to the garden here and the fields and water-haunted val- 
leys which encompassed it? The garden at Lincoln, 
confined within its brick walls and planted down in the 
middle of a town, was like some caged animal that here 
roamed wild and untamed. 

Oh, unforgettable morning when for the first time I 
awoke in the new house, and saw on the ceiling the light 
of the early sun that shone in through the copse outside, 
making a green and yellow dapple on the whitewash! 
The house was still silent; opposite me was Hugh's bed 
with his head half-hidden in the sheet, and I dressed 
stealthily and went downstairs and out. From the lawn 
I could see the viaduct over which we had come, and 
below it the misty roofs of the town, with one steeple 
piercing the vapour into sunlight. Then the mist faded 
like a frosty breath and beyond the town there stretched 
broad and shining the estuary of the Fal. Instead of the 
sorry serge of ivy, the house was clad with tree-fuchsias, 
and magnolia, and climbing roses and japonica: never 
was there such a bower of a habitation. On that April 
morning no doubt the fuchsia and the roses were not in 
flower, but looking back now, that moment seems to have 
sucked into itself the decorations of all the months, mak- 
ing in my mind a composite picture, from which I cannot 
now disentangle the true component parts. But surely 
there was a gorse bush at the corner of the house, on 
the edge of the copse through which the sun had shone, 



64 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

and surely it was on that morning that I found a mossy 
feathery little football of a tit's nest, woven inextricably 
among the spines of the gorse, and a virago of an infin- 
itesimal bird peeped out of the circular door, when I drew 
too near, and scolded me well for my intrusion. I passed 
up the winding path that led through the shrubbery, and 
found a circular pleasance with a summer-house. I went 
cautiously past a row of beehives ; I came through a door 
into a lane below the churchyard, where ferns (the sort 
of things not known before to exist in other localities 
than greenhouses and tables laid for dinner-parties) grew 
quite carelessly in the crevices, and so back, now breath- 
lessly scampering and surfeited with impressions past 
woodshed and haystack and stable, and upstairs again 
with heart and shoes alike drenched with the spring-dew. 
All that ensuing summer, lessons I fancy were con- 
siderably relaxed, and the lovely months passed like some 
fugue built on the subjects of that early walk, coloured, 
amplified and decorated. My father gave us a prize for 
botany (all specimens to be personally gathered, person- 
ally pressed, and mounted on sheets of cartridge paper 
with the English, and, if possible, the Latin name written 
below), and we scoured the hedges and liquid water-sides 
and the edges of the growing hay meadows, with a definite 
object in view. Study was necessitated by the addition 
of those names (Latin if possible), but this, like some 
homoeopathic dose conveyed in honey, was drowned in the 
delight of rambling explorations. The appetite of the 
collector was whetted ; there was a certain craving created 
for exact knowledge, but far above that was the interest 
in the loveliness that we should not otherwise have 
noticed, and the admiration which the interest engendered. 
Definitely also I think I trace a love of words in them- 



THE NEW HOME AT TRURO Q5 

selves which this studied collecting gave us, for what child 
could write "centaury" or "meadow-sweet," "bee-orchis," 
"comfrey," "loosestrife," or in more exalted spheres, 
"Osmunda regalis" on the virgin sheet of cartridge 
paper without tasting something of the flavour of these 
blossom-like syllables'? Or what child could fail to 
whoop with gladness when one of us brought an unknown 
bloom to a certain botanist friend of my father's, and 
was apologetically told that its name was "Stinking Arch- 
angel" % For in the lives of all of us, words and due dis- 
crimination in their use came to play a considerable part, 
and somewhere we hoarded these rich additions to our 
vocabulary. My sister Nellie won the prize, and I re- 
member that she afterwards confessed to me that she 
had stolen some of my pressed specimens and added them 
to her own. I never was more astonished, and class this 
lapse of hers with instances already given of my own 
demoniacal possession in the matter of the Easter egg 
and the sheepskin hearthrug. We both agreed that she 
could not possibly resign the prize, for that would lead 
to investigation, and she gave me a shilling by way of 
compensation. 

Birds' eggs as a collection had hitherto been represented 
in the Museum by one addled swan's egg, but now they 
took rank among the objects of existence. Here my 
father dictated the conditions under which they might 
be acquired, namely, that no egg was to be taken from 
any nest unless that nest contained four, and under no 
circumstances was more than one to be taken. There 
was of course no questioning his decision, but it seemed 
a pity to leave the great tit in the gorse bush to bring 
up a family of fifteen after our levy had been made, and 
never to be able to get a wood-pigeon's egg at all, since 



66 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

those prudent birds refused to lay more than two. But 
here Charles the groom shone forth gilded with the glory 
of celestial charity, for he came to me one morning with 
his entire collection of eggs and "would I accept of 
them?" Was there ever such a groom? And among 
these was a pair of wood-pigeon's eggs, so those parsi- 
monious parents were thwarted. 

For a while games were quite in abeyance, romantic 
natural history held the field. For consider: my sister 
Maggie and I had heard that otters were found in Corn- 
wall, and on that simple fact we built up the following 
fairy-like adventure. There was a round copse, rather 
lonely, on the edge of our fields; from it the ground de- 
clined in a steep down to the bottom of a valley, through 
which ran a stream so small that by wetting only one foot 
you could get across it at its widest part. But it ran 
below bushes and under steep banks, and it seemed highly 
probable that some of these Cornish otters lived there. 
Well, otters went about on land as well as in the water, 
and the lure of imagination pictured them taking a nice 
walk up this down and coming to the lonely copse. This 
grew very thick in brushwood, through which the otters 
(now indigenous in the copse) would certainly walk. So 
we hung nooses of string here and there a foot or so from 
the ground so that the otter might, in his walks, insert 
his head in the noose which would then be pulled tight, 
and we should come and capture him. This gave rise to 
further considerations; he might struggle, and get hurt 
if not strangled in the noose, so we must clearly be 
on the spot to loosen the noose, and substitute for it a 
chain and collar of one of the dogs. But if the otter 
saw us, he would probably gallop back over the down 
to his stream, so we built a hut woven of withies between 



THE NEW HOME AT TRURO 67 

two trees in which we could lie perdus, and watch for the 
otter. Then we should lead him chained to the stables, 
and gradually tame him till he could come out walking 
with us in company with Watch and the nanny-goat which 
already formed part of the family procession. (A second 
goat, called Capricorn, was presently added, but he had 
an odious habit of standing upright on his hind legs and 
hurling himself like a battering-ram against the hinder- 
parts of the unobservant, and when harnessed to a small 
truck which was used for gardening purposes, galloped 
with it at such speed that sparks flew from its wheels 
as they spurned the gravel.) 

A much larger bowl was now granted us for the aquari- 
um, and the spa and madrepores carefully brought from 
Lincoln (though the preserved hornet seemed to have 
been forgotten) did not more than cover the bottom of 
the new and sumptuous receptacle. Caddis-worms were 
culled from the streams that flowed Fal-wards, and 
whelk-like water-snails were comforted for their ex- 
patriation by having the chance of eating bread crumbs 
if so they wished. But the aquarium was still but a 
crawling democracy, and needed some denizen of livelier 
locomotive power to fill the post of king in this water- 
world. And then one day, as I have told before, in a 
book now mercifully forgotten, we caught the unique and 
famous stickleback, by accident you may say (if you 
believe in accidents), for certainly at the moment of his 
capture we had not even seen him, though it is true that 
we were dredging in the stream in which the otter still 
failed to make his appearance. 

My sister Maggie and I then were just emptying out 
the dredging (butterfly) net thinking we had found no 
great treasure on that cast, when something stirred in the 



68 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

residuary mud, after we had extracted no more than a 
caddis worm or two, and it was he. With tremulous rap- 
ture we popped him in a jar for transport to the aquarium, 
and overcome with the greatness of the moment (like 
Paolo and Francesco) we fished no more that day. For 
perhaps a week he swam gorgeously about this new king- 
dom, never getting over his delusion that if he swam 
swiftly enough against the side of it, he would find him- 
self at liberty again, and then the tragedy happened. 

It was our custom every morning to empty out the 
contents of the aquarium, down the drain in the stable 
yard, and replace them with fresh water. During this 
operation one of us held a piece of gauze over the lip 
of the aquarium so that none of its inhabitants should 
be poured away. And on one of these occasions, when 
the water was nearly drained out, and the stickleback 
swimming in short indignant circles in the residue, 
Maggie's hand which was holding the gauze slipped sud- 
denly and in a flood the remaining pint or two rushed out, 
the stickleback in the midst of it. With one flick of 
his tail, he disappeared down the drain in the stable yard, 
leaving us looking at each other in incredulous dis- 
may. . . . 

It was certainly during this summer that another idol 
came to fill that shrine of worship in my heart once oc- 
cupied by the chorister, and once again music was the 
hot coal that fired my incense, and the music in question 
was the mellow thunder of the organ in Kenwyn Church. 
I still believe that it was very skilfully and sympatheti- 
cally played by the unconscious object of my adoration. 
I must have fallen in love not really with what she was, 
but with what she did, for my passion was all ablaze 
before ever I had seen her face, or had the slightest idea 




ELIZABETH COOPER; "BETH." JET. 78 



[Page 69 



THE NEW HOME AT TRURO 71 

what she was like. All I knew of her was that she pro- 
duced these enchanting noises, since from our pew I 
could see nothing of her except her back, and a hand 
which reached out to shut a stop or open another bleat- 
[ing fount of melody. She played the pedals, those 
great wooden keys, and swayed slightly from side to side 
as her feet reached out for them. Once or twice, entering 
or leaving the church I had a glimpse of her in less than 
profile, and that served my adoration well enough. Her 
name was Mrs. Carter, and I daresay she was thirty years 
old or thereabouts, for she had a son of about my own 
age who used sometimes to turn over leaves for her, sit- 
ting by her on the organ bench, and though I don't think 
I would quite have exchanged mothers with him, I would 
have given most other things to take his place there. 

This seemed likely to be a barren affair, for Sunday 
after Sunday passed and I never saw more than the sway- 
ing back of Mrs. Carter. But by way of killing one bird 
and possibly two with one stone, I got leave somehow 
(with the gardener's boy to blow the bellows for an occa- 
sional quarter of an hour) to find my way about the 
organ. That exploration was a good bird in itself, but 
a better lurked in my mind, for I thought that Mrs. 
Carter might so easily come up to Kenwyn Church dur- 
ing the week to arrange her music or what not, and she 
would find Me sitting in her place and making tentative 
experiments with the stops, and straining after the nearer 
pedals with my short legs. Surely some day I should 
look up and see her standing by, and she would say, "Who 
taught you to play so nicely'?" (I perceive that vanity 
was mingled with passion) and I, in a happy tumult of 
emotion, would reply, "Oh, Mrs. Carter!" 

But this trap for Mrs. Carter never brought the hunter 



72 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

his quarry, and quite independent circumstances led me 
closer. It was decreed that my sisters should have music 
lessons and who but Mrs. Carter was engaged to be the 
teacher? Twice a week she would come to the house, 
so now no human agency, it would appear, could prevent 
us from meeting. But for some time a human agency did 
do so, that human agency being myself, for on observing 
Mrs. Carter's approach up the drive, an agony of shyness 
seized me, and I sat distracted in the day nursery until 
she had gone upstairs, and the noise of the piano from 
the schoolroom showed that she was engaged. Once, 
summoning up all my courage, I went in while the lesson 
was in progress, but she did not take her eyes off the copy 
of Schubert's Impromptu in A flat, which Maggie was 
fumbling at, and I went out and listened in the garden 
for the cessation of the piano, on which, I determined, I 
would walk quite calmly towards the front door and thus 
meet Mrs. Carter there or thereabouts. But, alas for 
this faint-hearted lover, as soon as the piano ceased I 
walked in precisely the other direction, and it was not 
likely that Mrs. Carter instead of going down the drive 
would force her way through the laurel shrubbery in 
order to find me. 

I blush to record the next step of my wooing. An 
invincible shyness (though I was not otherwise shy) for- 
bade my walking down the drive as Mrs. Carter was com- 
ing up, or taking any direct initiative, so I laid a lure 
for her. Observing her approach to the house, I regret 
to say that it was my custom to lean out of the schoolroom 
window, singing loudly. This would certainly attract 
her attention (indeed I think that once it did, and I 
rushed, panic-stricken, away) and she would say to one 
of my sisters, "Was that your brother who was singing? 



THE NEW HOME AT TRURO 73 

What a charming voice !" And one of my sisters would 
say, "Oh yes, he is very fond of music." Then surely, 
surely Mrs. Carter would say, "I don't think we have 
met," or perhaps even, "I should like to see him," and 
then my sister would come and find me (for after these 
bursts of melody out of the window I always fled like a 
frightened dove to the nursery) and say that Mrs. Carter 
would like to see me. I had looked on her face by now, 
and I pictured to myself how her kind mouth would smile 
as she shook hands, and she would say, "We must be 
friends, mustn't we, for we are both so fond of music." 
This bleating piece of Platonism came to an end some- 
how, and I grew to be able to contemplate Mrs. Carter's 
back swaying to her pedal-playing without emotion. But 
I think that this warm soft Cornish climate must have 
brought out a sort of measles of sentimentality in me, 
for without pause I transferred my sloppy heart to the 
curate at Kenwyn, the Rev. J. A. Reeve, who subse- 
quently was appointed Rector of Lambeth by my father, 
and was an intimate friend of all of us. He was a man 
who was habitually surrounded by an atmosphere of 
ecstasy, an adorer of children, and next door to a fanatic 
in matters of religion, beloved and blissful, living in a 
light that never was on sea or land. To the outward 
view he presented a long lean figure, walking at a tre- 
mendous pace, and perspiring profusely, with his umbrella 
tucked under his arm, and his hands clasped in perpetual 
admiration of this inimitable world, and the saints that 
he constantly discovered in it under the most deceptive 
of disguises. There were no "miserable sinners" in his 
sight; the most impenitent were but rather wilful chil- 
dren of the Father. He had a mane of yellow hair which 
he tossed back as he laughed peals of uproarious appreci- 



74 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

ation of any joke at all. But whereas with the chorister 
and Mrs. Carter there certainly was some personal, physi- 
cal attraction (though no doubt the main source of the 
inspiration was music), with Mr. Reeve there was no 
personal attraction of any kind, and the experience was 
of the stained-glass window order, in which I was cast for 
the stained-glass window, and Mr. Reeve for the wor- 
shipper. At the bottom of it all perhaps there was some 
grain of genuine religious sentiment, but this was so 
largely diluted by mawkishness and vanity, that examina- 
tion fails to find more than that minute presence described 
in the analysis of medicinal waters as "some traces." He 
used to breakfast with us after a short service in Kenwyn 
Church at a quarter to eight every morning, to which we 
children were encouraged though not obliged to go, and 
he was a kind of unofficial chaplain to my father, writing 
his letters for him half the morning with a puckered brow, 
but ready to burst into peals of laughter on the smallest 
opportunity for mirth. Every Sunday also, he came to 
tea before service, and afterwards to supper, and every 
Sunday evening after tea I went with him into a spare 
bedroom where, with his arm round my neck, he read me 
the sermon he was about to preach. I suppose my com- 
ments were very edifying and satisfactory, for he cer- 
tainly told my mother that "that boy was not far from 
the kingdom of God." She must very wisely have begged 
him not to tell me that, for I had no idea of it at the 
time. Once, indeed, he sadly failed me, for meeting me 
as I was being taken to the dentist by Beth, there to have 
two teeth out under gas, he said that to have gas was 
the same as getting drunk, and I went on my weary way 
feeling not only terrified but wicked as well. It is true, 
though scarcely credible, that the gas was administered by 



THE NEW HOME AT TRURO 75 

Mrs. Tuck the dentist's wife, and that there was no an- 
esthetist or doctor present. But I daresay Mrs. Tuck per- 
formed her office very well, for I had a delightful dream 
about being in a balloon in the middle of a rainbow. 

That autumn lessons began again, and until I went 
to a private school next Easter I suffered under the awful 
rule of a German governess, not our kind Miss Braun of 
Lincoln, but a dark-eyed and formidable woman who, I 
was firmly convinced, must truly have been the terrible 
Madame de la Rougierre in the tale of Uncle Silas which 
I was reading then in small instalments, being too 
frightened to read much at a time. She cannot have been 
with us long, for before I went to school the beloved Miss 
Bramston came back, not originally as governess but for 
another and a tragic reason. 

The Christmas holidays of 1877 were the last when 
the whole of the family of six, with my father and mother 
and Beth, who was absolutely of the family also, were 
together. My eldest brother Martin was then seventeen, 
and so great a gulf is fixed between that age and ten, 
that never, till the day I saw him last, did I form any 
clear idea of him. Here, then, I must abandon the stand- 
point I have hitherto maintained, namely, that of speak- 
ing of the events of these early years through my own 
personal recollection of what impression they made on 
me as the jolly days slipped by, and mingle recollection 
with subsequent knowledge. 

At the age of fourteen Martin had won the first open 
scholarship at Winchester, and had now mentally de- 
veloped into an extraordinary maturity and wisdom. He 
took an amazing interest in the political affairs of the 
day, in classics he was considered to be perhaps the most 
remarkable scholar that Winchester ever had, and as wit- 



76 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

ness to his innate love of learning there was a library 
which he had himself acquired, and which must have 
been unique for a boy of his age. Already at Lincoln 
he had "spotted" an Albert Diirer woodcut pasted on to 
the fly-leaf of some trumpery book at a penny bookstall, 
and had breathlessly conveyed the treasure home, and 
he and my father used to exchange original Latin versions 
of hymns. But this precocity of scholarship did not in 
the least check his boyishness, which verged on the fan- 
tastic, for once he appeared in school with four little 
Japanese dolls attached to the four strings of his shoe- 
laces, and gravely proceeded with his construing. There 
are notebooks full of his exquisite ridiculous drawings 
with appropriate text in his minute handwriting: there are 
poems as ridiculous, and behind it all was this serious 
limpid spirit. . . . 

He went back that January to Winchester, and Arthur 
to Eton, and one day, early in February he had a sud- 
den attack of giddiness, and then followed an attack of 
meningitis. My father and mother were sent for; he 
was then unconscious. Arthur went there from Eton, 
but my mother decided that we younger children should 
not go and instead Miss Bramston came down to us in 
Cornwall. The rest I will tell by means of two letters 
which my mother wrote to Beth. I found them, after 
my mother's death, forty years after, in a little packet of 
papers which had belonged to Beth, and consisted of let- 
ters from all of us which she had always kept. 

"Winchester, 

Friday (Feb. 8, 1878). 
Dearest Beth, 

I must write you a few lines to-day. Our dear one is no 

better at all. Nothing can be done for him but to watch him and 



THE NEW HOME AT TRURO 77 

to give nourishment and to pray and trust in (rod. Everything 
possible is done for him ; he has two nurses, day and night. We 
go in and out of his room from time to time. He lies quite peace- 
fully, mostly sleeping, and evidently quite unconscious of any 
pain. There is no sign of pain about his face. He knows us now 
and then, we think, but he does not speak. He takes a little nour- 
ishment from time to time, but with difficulty. Sir William Jen- 
ner has been sent for, though there does not seem anything he can 
do. 

Dearest Beth, it is such a comfort to think that you are with 
those dear ones at home. I don't know what they would do with- 
out you, or how we could bear to think of leaving them unless 
they had you. We are both quite sure that it is better they should 
not come. They could not be with him, and it is no use their 
hearing details. We ought to and must keep before their young 
minds just the Love of God, whether He shews it in giving our 
darling back to our prayers, or in taking to Himself so beautiful 
and holy a life. 

But we must not, and do not give up hope. Though as far as 
man knows or sees there is nothing to be done, and the doctors 
dare not give us hope of recovery, yet just where man is most 
powerless, God does work, often, and we continue to pray to Him 
in hope for our darling's restoration. While there is life, we will 
not despair. 

Dearest Beth, God keep you all : the thought of you is such a 
comfort to us. Pray yourself continually, — encourage them all 
to pray. One of the Psalms to-day begins, T waited patiently for 
the Lord, and He inclined unto me, and heard my calling.' 

All our heart's love is with you all always. 

Your most loving 

Mary Benson." 

This is the second letter: 

"Dearest Friend and Mother Beth, 

Be comforted for Martin. He is in perfect peace, in won- 
derful joy, far happier than we could ever have made him. And 
what did we desire in our hearts but to make him happy? And 



78 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

now he will help us out of his perfect happiness. He died with- 
out a struggle — his pure and gentle spirit passed straight to God 
his Father, and now he is ours and with us more than ever. Ours 
now, in a way that nothing can take away. 

Dearest Beth, we are all going to be more loving than ever, 
living in love we shall live in God, and we shall live close to our 
dear one. 

One is so sure now, that sin is the only separation, and that 
sting is taken out of death by Jesus Christ. My heart aches for 
the dear ones at home, but I know you are a mother to them, and 
will support and comfort their hearts, and keep before them that 
God is love, and that He is loving us in this thing also. And I 
want them to think of Martin, our darling, in perfect peace for 
ever, free from fear, free from pain, from anxiety for evermore, 
and to think how he will rejoice to see us walking more and more 
in Love for his dear sake. 

We cannot grudge him his happiness. 

Dearest Beth, our boy is with God: he knows everything now, 
and will help us. The peace of God Almighty be with you. 
Your own child, your fellow-mother, 

M. B." 

There is nothing that could tell so simply and com- 
pletely, not only what my mother was, but what Beth 
was, as this letter which my mother wrote on the morn- 
ing after the death of her eldest son. It gives the soul 
of them both, of my mother that she could write it, and 
of Beth the "fellow-mother," to whom it was written. 

When I was old enough to understand my mother told 
me about the day on which that second letter was written. 
She had, so she said to me, a couple of hours of the most 
wonderful happiness she had ever experienced on that 
day, when she realized that though God had taken, yet 
she could give. Her inmost being knew that, and when 
she came back to us a few days later, there was no shadow 
on her, for all that she said to Beth was the simple un- 



THE NEW HOME AT TRURO 79 

touched copy of the writing on her heart. But even now 
I can remember my father's face, as he stepped from the 
carriage into the lamplight, for it was the face of a most 
loving man stricken with the death of the boy he loved 
best, who had been nearest his heart, and was knit into 
his very soul. Often has my mother told me that though 
he accepted Martin's death as God's will, he could not, 
out of the very strength of his human love, adapt himself 
to it. His faith was unshaken, but the deep waters had 
gone over him, and years afterwards, when he saw the 
martins skimming about the eaves of the house at Adding- 
ton, he wrote about them and his own Martin a little 
poem infinitely touching; and never, so I believe, did 
some part of him cease to wonder why his Martin had 
been taken from him. 



CHAPTER V 

PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 

AFTER Easter, 1878, I was sent to a private school 
presided over by Mr. Ottiwell Waterfield, at 
Temple Grove, East Sheen, and remained there three 
years. The house and grounds vanished entirely some- 
where about 1908, under the trail of the suburban builder, 
and now hideous rows of small residences occupy their 
spaciousness. For the purposes of a school numbering 
some hundred and thirty boys, the original George I and 
Queen Anne house had been largely supplemented with 
dormitories and schoolrooms, and a modern wing as 
large as the house ran at right angles by the edge of 
the cricket field. But the part where Mr. Waterfield and 
his family lived had not been touched: there was a fine 
library, drawing-room, and his study (how awful was 
that place ! ) en suite, a paved hall, with a full-sized bil- 
liard table and a piano where a frail widow lady called 
Mrs. Russell gave music-lessons, and the French master, 
whose name really was M. Voltaire, conducted a danc- 
ing-class as well as teaching French and being, I think, 
slightly immoral. A passage out of the hall gave on to 
the private garden of Mr. Waterfield, where there were 
fine cedar trees, and a broad oak-staircase led up from it 
to the bedrooms of the family. 

Already, darkly in the glass of fiction and under the 
title of David Blaize, I have hinted at some of the habits 

80 



PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 81 

of the young gentlemen who led a life, alternately up- 
roarious and terror-stricken, in the other part of the house, 
but now more personal details can be indulged in. By 
far the most salient feature in the school, even as the 
sun is the most salient feature in the day, making it 
precisely what it is, was Mr. Waterfield himself. He 
seems now to me to have been nine feet high, and he 
certainly walked with a curious rocking motion, which 
was convenient, because if you were where you should 
not be, you could detect his coming long before he could 
detect anybody. He had a square grey beard which smelt 
of cigars, a fact known from his practice, when he had 
frightened the life out of you by terrible harangues, of 
saying, "Well, that's all over, my boy," and kissing you. 
I believe him to have been about the best private school- 
master who ever lived, for he ruled by love and fear com- 
bined in a manner that while it inspired small boys with 
hellish terror, yet rewarded them with the sweet fruits 
of hero-worship. He exacted blind obedience, under 
peril of really infamous torture with a thick ruler with 
which he savagely caned offending hands, but he man- 
aged at the same time to make us appreciate his approba- 
tion. The ruler was kept in a convenient drawer of the 
knee-hole table in his study, and was a perfectly brutal 
instrument, but the approach of the ruler, like a depres- 
sion over the Atlantic, was always heralded by storm- 
cones. The first of these was the taking of the keys 
from his trousers-pocket, and then you had time to pull 
yourself together to retract an equivocation, to confess 
a fault, or try to remember something you had been re- 
peatedly told. The second storm-cone was the insertion 
of the key into the drawer where the ruler was kept. You 
had to be of very strong nerve when that second storm- 



82 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

cone was hoisted, and divert your mind from the possible 
future to the supine which you could not recollect, for 
when the key was once inserted there might any moment 
be a sudden startling explosion of wrath, and out flew 
the ruler. Then came a short agonizing scene, and the 
blubbering victim after six smart blows had the handle 
of the door turned for him by somebody else, because 
his hands were useless through pain. The ruler was 
quite rare, and probably well deserved; anyhow it was 
the counter-balance to the hero-worship born of Mr. 
Waterfield's approval. For more heinous offences there 
was birching, but that had certain compensations, for 
afterwards you took down your breeches and showed the 
injured parts to admiring companions. But there was 
nothing to show, as Mrs. Pullet said about the boluses, 
when you were caned. Besides you could play cricket 
quite easily, shortly after a whipping, but no human hand 
could hold a bat shortly after the application of the ruler. 

The top form (called the first form, not the sixth form} 
had certain specified lessons every week taken by Water- 
field, and he did not teach regularly in other forms. But 
he was liable to make meteoric appearances soon after 
the beginning of a lesson in the big schoolroom where the 
next three forms were at work, and take any lesson him- 
self. A hush fell as he strode in, and we all cowered like 
partridges below a kite, while he glared round, selecting 
the covey on to which he pounced. This was a subtle 
plan, for you could never be sure that it would not be he 
who would hear any particular lesson, and the chance of 
that made it most unwise to neglect any preparation alto- 
gether. 

The school got its fair share of public-school scholar- 
ships, so I suppose the teaching of the other masters was 



PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 83 

sound, but I cannot believe that a stranger set of in- 
structors were ever got together. Rawlings, who taught 
the first form, used habitually to read the Sporting Times 
in school with his feet up on the desk until the time 
came for him to hear us construe. Daubeny, the master 
of the second form, had no thought but for the encourage- 
ment of a small moustache; Davy of the third form 
used mostly to be asleep; Geoghehan of the fourth form 
(called "Geege") had lost his right arm, and used always 
to have some favourite in his class, who sat on his knee 
in school time and was an important personage, for he 
could, if you were friends with him, always persuade 
Geege not to report misconduct to Waterfield. One such 
boy, now a steady hereditary legislator, I well remember : 
he pulled Geege's beard, and altered the marks in his 
register, and ruled him with a rod of iron. Geege was 
otherwise an effective disciplinarian, and had an unpleas- 
ant habit, if he thought you were not attending, of spear- 
ing the back of your hand with the nib of his pen, dipped 
in purple ink. Then there was a handwriting specialist 
called Prior who gave out stationery on Saturdays. His 
appearance was always hailed by a sort of Gregorian 
chant to which the words were, "All boys wanting ink, 
go to Mr. Prior." Then came Mr. Voltaire, the gay 
young Frenchman, and these with one or two more of 
whom I cherish no recollection all lived together at a 
house in East Sheen called Clarence House, and were, 
I think, a shade more frightened of Waterfield than we. 
The ways of boys are past finding out, and what could 
have induced us to believe that the food supplied was 
disgusting to the verge of being poisonous I have no idea. 
But tradition, at the time of which I am speaking, or- 
dained that this was so, and how often when I was long- 



84, OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

ing to eat a plateful of pudding have I shovelled it into 
an envelope to bury in the playground, since the currants 
in it were held to be squashed flies and the suet to be 
made with scourings from dirty plates. Then somebody 
once saw potatoes, no doubt intended for school consump- 
tion, lying on the floor in a shed in the garden, which 
was considered a terrible way in which to keep potatoes. 
I remembering telling my father this, and with the utmost 
gravity he answered that every potato ought to be 
wrapped up singly in silver paper. He also asked if it was 
true that Mr. Waterfield had been seen, with his trousers 
turned up diluting the beer for dinner out of a garden 
watering-can. Most poisonous of all were supposed to 
be the sausages which we had for breakfast now and 
then : it was a point of honour not to eat a single mouthful 
of this garbage. Then suddenly for no reason the fashion 
changed, and the food was supposed to be, and indeed 
it probably was, excellent. We gobbled up our sausages, 
asked for more and got it, and ate the potatoes that had 
once lain on the dirty ground, and had even degraded 
themselves by growing in it. . . . 

I plunged headlong into this riot of school life and for 
the first year enjoyed it enormously. I had been placed 
too low in the school and without the slightest effort I 
found myself term after term at the top of the class, and 
loaded with prizes, for no merit of my own but for the 
fact that I had the kind of superficial memory that re- 
tained what it had scarcely attended to at all. In con- 
sequence for a whole year I had no fear of Waterfield as 
regards lessons, and devoted myself to games, stag-beetles, 
and friendship, and I find it hard to decide whether the 
rapture of making twenty at cricket against overhand 
bowling (not lobs from sisters) was greater or less than 



PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 85 

finding a stag-beetle on the palings, or in the early dawn 
of summer mornings going on tiptoe into the next dormi- 
tory, and, after waking up my special friend, sitting on 
his bed, propped up with pillows and talking in whispers 
till there came the sound of the dressing-bell, which por- 
tended the entrance of the matron. Then it was neces- 
sary to steal round the corner of his cubicle, and slide 
back into my own bed, there apparently to fall into a 
refreshing slumber, for to be caught out of bed before 
it was time to dress meant to be reported to Waterfield, 
who took a serious, and to me then an unintelligible view 
of such an offence. But an hour's whispered conversation 
with a friend was worth that risk, indeed probably the 
risk added a certain savour to it, and perhaps our present 
Minister at the Vatican has recollections similar to mine. 
Or else it would be I who was awakened by the soft-step- 
ping night-shirted figure, and moved aside in bed to give 
room for him to sit there, and there would be plans to 
be made, and then combining friendship with stag-beetles 
into one incomparable compound we would take the stag- 
beetles (for there were two of them, male and female 
called "The Monarch of the Glen" and "Queen") out 
of my washing basin, where they passed the night in 
optimistic attempts to climb its slippery sides, and refresh 
them with a breakfast of elm leaves and perhaps the half 
of a strawberry. They had to be put back into two match- 
boxes which were their travelling carriages before Jane 
the matron came round, for she had said that if ever she 
found stag-beetles in basins again she would throw them 
out of the window. 

An "Exeat" now and then diversified the course of the 
term, and these I spent with my Aunt Eleanor who had 
married Mr. Thomas Hare, famous for his book on the 



86 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

Representation of Minorities. He was a great friend of 
John Stuart Mill, whom Aunt Eleanor, for some reason 
of her own, always called "Mr. Mills." They lived in a 
house near Surbiton which had a tower in it, on the top 
floor of which was Uncle Hare's laboratory, chemistry 
being a hobby of his, and he made oxygen in glass retorts, 
and put snippets of potassium to scurry, flaring and self- 
lit, on the surface of a basin of water. . . . On the 5th 
of November every year I was asked to a children's party, 
given by Princess Mary, Duchess of Teck, at the White 
Lodge, Richmond Park, and there was an immense tea 
followed by fireworks in the garden. There we were 
given squibs and told to be sure to throw them away as 
soon as they burned low, before the explosion came at 
the end, and on one of these occasions the Duke of Teck 
wanting a light for his cigar told me to give him my squib, 
for he had no matches. I told him that it was already 
burning low, but he said "Wass*?" rather alarmingly, and 
so I handed it to him. He had just applied the burning 
end of it to his cigar when the explosion came, and his 
face and hair were covered with sparks, and he danced 
about, and said sonorous things in German, and I gathered 
that he was vexed. . . . 

The minds of children as they grow have those diseases 
incident to childhood much as their bodies have. I had 
had my measles of sentimentality, and having got over 
that I developed during this year a kind of whooping- 
cough of lying. I used to invent and repeat extraordinary 
experiences, which had their root in fact, but were em- 
bellished by my imagination to scenes of unparalleled 
magnificence. For instance, the family spent that sum- 
mer holidays at Etretat, crossing from Southampton to 



PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 87 

Havre, and I came back with Arthur who was going to 
Eton, a day late for the assembling of Temple Grove. 
The crossing was an extremely rough one; all night the 
water broke over the decks heavy and solid, and certainly 
some unfortunate passenger came into the cabin drenched 
through. All next day as I travelled to Temple Grove 
my imagination worked on these promising materials, and 
I told my admiring schoolfellows that we had barely es- 
caped shipwreck. The waves, which certainly did deluge 
the decks, I represented as having poured in torrents down 
the funnels, extinguishing the furnaces, so that we had 
to stop till the fires were relit, while out of the passenger 
who came down drenched into the cabin I constructed a 
Frenchman who was supposed to have said to me in 
broken English, "Ze water is not coming over in bucket- 
fuls it is coming over in shipfuls." So vividly did I 
imagine this, that before long I really half believed it. 
Again the next winter holidays were marked by a heavy 
snowfall in Cornwall succeeded by a partial thaw and a 
hard frost. In consequence the horses had to be roughed, 
and it is certainly a fact that the carriage which was 
bringing my father home one evening slewed so violently 
that, according to his quite authentic description, he 
looked out of the window, and saw instead of the hedge- 
rows the steep glazed road in front of him. I seized 
hungrily on that incident, and on returning to school 
said that we had enjoyed delightful sledging in the holi- 
days, over roads and lakes, adding the further embellish- 
ment that I personally drove the horses. . . , There were 
more of these fictions which I cannot now remember, all 
of which had some exiguous foundation of fact, and great 
was my horror when an implacable enemy handed me one 



88 OUR FAMILY "AFFAIRS 

morning a scrap of paper, in the manner of an ultimatum 
headed : 

"Benson's Lies" 

and there below, neatly summarized were all these stories 
which I thought had been listened to with such respectful 
envy. The implacable enemy added darkly that "they" 
(whoever "they" might be) were considering what they 
were going to do about it all. I suppose consternation 
was graven on me, for he stonily added, "Yes, you may 
well turn pale," and I pictured (my imagination again 
rioting off) this damning text being handed to Waterfield, 
who would send it to my father. What was the public 
upshot, I cannot remember, but by aid of that terrifying 
medicine I made a marvellously brisk recovery from that 
particular disease. 

Some time during that first year at school, there oc- 
curred a scene which I still look back on as among the 
most awful I have ever witnessed. Two boys, one high 
in the school, a merry handsome creature, the other quite 
a small boy, suddenly disappeared. They were in their 
places at breakfast, but during breakfast were sent for 
by Waterfield and at school that morning their places 
were empty. They did not appear at dinner, they did 
not appear at tea, and that night in the next dormitory 
their beds were vacant. Jane said they were not ill, and 
forbade any further questions, and curious whisperings 
went about, of which I could not grasp the import. Next 
morning there came a sudden order that all the school 
should be assembled, and we crowded into the big school- 
room. Presently Waterfield entered with his cap and 
gown on, followed by the two missing boys. He took 



PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 89 

his place at his desk, and motioned them to stand out 
in the middle of the room. There was a long silence. 

Then Waterfield began to speak in a low voice that 
grew gradually louder. He told us all to look at them, 
which we did. He then told us that they had brought 
utter ruin and disgrace on themselves, that no public 
school would receive them, and that they had broken 
their parents' hearts. They were not going to stop an 
hour longer amongst us, for their presence was filthy and 
contaminating. They were publicly expelled and would 
now go back to the homes on which they had brought 
disgrace. 

He then told us all to go out, and was left with those 
two, and I wondered, limp with terror, whether he was 
going to kill them, and what on earth it was that they 
had done. And if I was limp then, you may judge what 
was my condition, when presently the school sergeant who 
brought summonses from Waterfield told me that he 
wished to see me. . . . Indeed that imaginative habit 
which had made up so many glorious adventures for my- 
self on slender grounds was a poor friend at that moment, 
for as I went to the study, it vividly suggested to me that 
I too, for some unintelligible reason, would be despatched 
to Cornwall, a ruined and disgraced boy. 

I tapped at the door, tapped again without receiving 
any answer and entered. Waterfield was sitting at his 
table and he was crying. He indicated to me that I was 
to sit down, which I did. Then he blew his nose with an 
awful explosion of sound, and came with his rocking walk 
across to the chimney-piece. 

"I want to ask you a question," he said. "Do you 
understand why those two boys were sent away?" 

"No, sir," said I. 



90 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

His voice choked for a moment. 

"I am very glad to hear it," he said. "I thank God for 
that. You may go." 

Here was a mysterious affair! I went out wondering 
about a million things, why Waterfield was crying, why 
he had sent for me, and above all why those two boys 
were publicly disgraced. I began to grub in my memory 
for any clue, and recalled trivial incidents. The elder 
of the two had been rather kind to a junior like myself: 
he had nodded good night to me one evening on the stairs, 
and I think the next night had given me a lump of Turk- 
ish delight. Finally, only a few days before, he had by 
virtue of his first-form privileges taken me for a stroll 
round the wooded grounds, where the first-form might 
go at pleasure, and I felt highly honoured at his notice. 
He had become rather odd: he began questions like, "I 

say, do you ever ," and stopped. As I did not know 

what he was talking about, and only grew puzzled, he 
remarked rather contemptuously, "I didn't know you were 
such a kid. Why, when I was your age . . ." 

Then our privacy came to an abrupt conclusion, for 
we suddenly met Waterfield, with a large cigar, strolling 
along a path. He took us both into a greenhouse, and 
gave us some grapes, and walked back with us, one on 
each side of him. 

There was nothing there at the time which had roused 
any strong curiosity in me. I had wondered vaguely why 
these sentences were left unfinished, and why he had only 
then discovered that I was such a kid. But now, in an 
intensity of wonder as to why Waterfield had been so 
glad to know that the reason for this expulsion was in- 
comprehensible to me, and as to what that reason was, I 
began, with the groping instincts of a young thing, that 



PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 91 

has either to guess its way, or to be told it, to fit meaning- 
less little pieces of the puzzle together, trying first one 
pair of fragments and then another, intensely curious 
and instinctively certain that there was something here 
which other boys understood, and which Waterfield cer- 
tainly understood, but which I did not. I supposed that 
the completed puzzle contained something in which right 
and wrong were involved, since a transgression such as 
the two expelled boys had been guilty of was an affair 
that could not be atoned for by a caning or a birching. 

For days after that, hints, fragments, surmises floated 
as thickly about the school as motes of dust in a sunbeam. 
We were forbidden to talk about the subject at all, which 
gave an additional zest to discussion. Some knew a great 
deal, some knew a little, some knew nothing. Those who 
knew nothing learned a little, those who knew a little 
learned more, and we seethed with things that were un- 
savoury, because the secrecy and the prohibition made the 
unsavouriness of them. . . . But in heaven's name, why 
could we not all have been given clean lessons in natural 
history? Is it better that young boys should guess and 
experiment and be left to find things out for themselves, 
with the gusto that arises from the notion of forbidden 
mysteries, than that they should be taught cleanness by 
their elders, instead of being left to experimentalize in 
dirtiness? Until there is extracted from boyhood its 
proper legitimate inquisitiveness which is the reason of its 
growth, nothing can prevent boys from seeking to learn 
about those things which its elders cover up in a silence 
so indiscreet as to be criminal. It is a libellous silence, 
for it surrounds, in an atmosphere of suspicion, knowledge 
which is perfectly wholesome and necessary. 

Between terms came holidays full of things just as 



92 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

wonderful as the swamping of the furnaces of the Havre 
boat and "Benson's lies" generally, and these must be 
lumped together, to form a general summary as to how we 
amused ourselves for the next three years or so, when holi- 
days brought us together. About now a joint literary 
effort of all us children, called (for no known reason) 
the Saturday Magazine, made its punctual appearance. 
Already we were such savage wielders of the pen that 
one issue every holidays no longer contented us, but two 
or three times between term and term my father and 
mother were regaled of an evening with a flood of prose 
and poetry. Arthur would say one morning, "Let's have 
a Saturday Magazine next Tuesday," and straightway 
we called for a supply of that useful paper known as 
"sermon paper," which contains exactly twenty-three 
lines to a small quarto page, faintly ruled in blue. Dia- 
logues, satirical sketches, tales of adventure, essays, and 
poems, were poured out in rank profusion, the rule being 
that each member of the family should contribute "at 
least" four pages of prose, or one page of verse. There 
was, after we had all got blooded with the lust of produc- 
tion, little cause for this minimum regulation, and per- 
haps it would have been better, in view of subsequent 
fruitfulness, to have substituted for the minimum restric- 
tion of " at least" a maximum restriction of "at most." 
Yet this habit of swift composition gave us all a certain 
ease in expressing ourselves if only because we expressed 
ourselves so freely. The contents of the Saturday Maga- 
zine were, since all choice of subject was left to the author, 
of the most varied description. Arthur would produce 
(at least) an essay in the style of The Spectator (Addi- 
son's) describing how he threw a cake of yellow soap 
at a serenading cat, Nellie would refresh us with an 



PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 93 

imaginary interview with our Scotch coachman on the 
subject of sore backs, Maggie, whose chief avocation now 
was to rear an enormous number of guinea-pigs and find 
names for them, gave a dialogue between Atahualpa and 
Ixlitchochitl (only she knew how to spell them) ; poor 
Fred treated them to a poem on the Devil, which he felt 
sure solved the very difficult question about the origin 
of evil, and Hugh, who by reason of his youth was let 
off with two pages of prose, produced adventures so 
bloody, that out of sheer reaction his audience rocked with 
unquenchable laughter. There was a Saturnalian liberty 
allowed, and my mother's experiences with a runaway 
pony, or her fondness for cheese, were treated with sharp- 
edged mockery, and even my father made a ludicrous ap- 
pearance in some dialogue, where he was supposed to be 
worsted by the superior wit of his children. . . . 

In lighter mood (save the mark) we played a poetry 
game called "American nouns," in which you had to 
answer, metrically and with rhyme, a question written 
down at the top of a half -sheet of paper, and bring in 
a particular word like "unconstitutional" or some stumper 
of that kind. This particular word was given to my Uncle 
Henry Sidgwick together with the question, "What do 
you know of astronomy 1 ?" to which in the winking of an 
eye he produced the following gem : 

Phoebus, the glorious king of the sky, 

In his unconstitutional way, 
Dispenses at will his bounties on high 

And royally orders the day. 
No starry assembly controls his bright flow, 
No critical comet presumes to say "No." 

Or again,, my mother having to answer the question, 



94 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

"Does the moon draw the sea?" and to bring in the word 
"artist," made a glorious last stanza: 

Ask me no more, but let me be ; 

My temper's of the tartest: 
For if the moon doth draw the sea, 

Why, then she is an artist. 

Somehow she got the reputation of being an indifferent 
poet, but that was considered remarkably good "for her," 
and worthy of being immortalized on the printing press 
which belonged to this epoch. This was a small wooden 
box, at the bottom of which you set the type backwards 
if you were capable of a sustained effort, and if not, any- 
how. The "forme" was then smudged over with a black 
roller anointed with printer's ink, and letters of the set 
type used to stick to it (like teeth in toffee) and must be 
replaced if possible. Then a piece of paper was gingerly 
laid on the top, a lid was fitted on, and a lever was turned 
which pressed the lid (and of course the paper) against 
the inked type. The lever got out of order and I think 
broke, so instead several smart hammer-blows were given 
to the lid in order to produce the same result. The 
printed paper was then taken out, and the marks of 
punctuation inserted by hand, because there weren't any 
commas and colons and so forth in our fount, or because 
it was easier to put them in afterwards. "E's" had often 
to be left out too, and inserted afterwards, because "e" 
being a common letter was not sufficiently represented 
if you wanted to print a long piece like Uncle Henry's. 
. , . Chemistry, also, among the Arts and Sciences 
claimed our attention, especially Maggie's (when she was 
not too busy about guinea-pigs) and mine. The highest 
feat that we attained to, and that wanted a lot of stirring, 



PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 95 

was to dissolve a threepenny-piece in nitric acid. Then 
there was photography; I think a godfather gave me a 
camera, and we made our own wet plates which was very 
difficult, and began with pouring collodion (was it collo- 
dion?) smoothly over a piece of glass. Then nitrate of 
silver — we might have used the dissolved threepenny-bit, 
I suppose — must be applied. The plates usually recorded 
nothing whatever, but once an image remarkably like the 
yew tree outside the nursery window did certainly ap- 
pear there. Arthur began collecting butterflies and moths, 
which eventually became a very important asset to a 
museum which now overflowed into all our bedrooms. 
There was an extraordinary abundance of clouded yellows 
{Colzas Edusa, and why do I remember that?) one year 
and he used to return, profusely perspiring, with captives 
in chip boxes, to which Maggie and I were anaesthetists, 
for Nellie took no part in this collection, as she objected 
to killing butterflies. 

Small strips of blotting-paper — this was our procedure 
— were taken, and moons of chloroform, quite similar to 
the eau-de-Cologne moons, were made on them from an 
unstoppered bottle of chloroform. These were inserted 
in the chip boxes while Arthur, the executioner, got the 
oxalic acid and a nib. With this lethal weapon he speared 
their unconscious thoraxes, and out came the setting- 
boards. Nocturnal expeditions for purposes of "sugar- 
ing" tree-trunks were even more exciting. We mixed beer 
and sugar, heating them together, and at dusk pasted 
trees in the garden with the compound which Watch 
found so delicious that if the jug containing it was left 
on the ground for a moment, he began lapping it up. 
On such sugaring nights I was allowed to sit up later 
than usual, and about ten o'clock the excited procession 



96 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

again started with more chip boxes, and a dark lantern, 
which was turned on to the sugared patches. There 
were the bright-eyed creatures of the night, drunkenly 
feasting, and Arthur enriched his pill-boxes with Silver 
Y and an occasional Golden Y, and rejected the Yellow 
Underwing, and grew taut over the Crimson Underwing, 
while I carried a butterfly net, and swooped with it at 
wandering moths which were attracted by the unveiled 
lantern carried by Maggie, and Watch wagged his tail 
and licked up gratefully the droppings from the sugared 
tree and any moths that might be on them. And then 
Beth would come out and say that "my Mamma" said 
that I must go to bed at once, and I usually didn't. O 
happy nights! 

I think every day in those holidays must have lasted 
a week, and every month a year, for when I consider it, 
we surely spent the whole afternoons in playing 
"Pirates" in the garden. Theoretically now, as well as 
practically then, I believe that "Pirates," a game evolved 
by the family generally, and speedily brought to its per- 
fect and stereotyped form, was the best sporting inven- 
tion, requiring no material implements, of modern time. 
What powers of the mind, what refinements of cunning, 
compared to which deer-stalking is mere child's play, were 
brought into action ! For here we were up against each 
other's wits, and awful were the results of any psycho- 
logical mistake. I must describe that game for the bene- 
fit of families of energetic children who like thinking and 
running and scoring off each other. 

At the top of the garden there was a summer-house, 
and that of course was "home." There was a lateral 
laurel hedge to the left of it which screened a path that 
led by the copse outside the nursery windows, and com- 



PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 97 

municated by means of a garden door with the abysses of 
the stable copse, and the stable yard. The henyard, an 
outlying piece of kitchen garden, and the other copse, 
excellent hiding-places in themselves, were outside the 
range of pirates, and the touch-line, so to speak, beyond 
which neither pirates nor trophy-seekers might go passed 
on the hither side of these. Straight in front of "home" 
was an open space, safe in itself but hedged in with peril, 
for there were climbable trees, from which a pirate might 
almost drop on your head, and thickets. To the right 
was a most dangerous door, because the latch was stiff 
and if you were pursued from outside by the pirate you 
were almost bound to be caught before you could kick 
it open. In the middle distance, straight ahead were 
beehives; beyond, kitchen garden and orchard. Never 
was there anything so trappy. 

So much for the theatre: the dramatis persona were 
five (occasionally six when my mother played, once seven 
when my father played), and of this number there were 
chosen in rotation two pirates, but my father and mother, 
of course, were never pirates, because they would not have 
had a chance, as you will see. The pirates, being chosen, 
went away together, and were given five minutes law to 
hide wherever they chose within the assigned limits. Dur- 
ing these five minutes a captain was chosen from among 
the blockade runners, who directed his side as to what 
trophy each of them was to bring from his cruise. One 
had, for instance, to bring back a croquet hoop from the 
lawn, another an apple from the third tree in the orchard, 
another an ivy-leaf from the stable-yard. With their 
trophies in their hands they had to return in safety to the 
summer-house without being caught by a pirate. 

So far all is simple, but now there comes in the great 



98 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

point of the game. No pirate could catch you, until you 
had your trophy, whatever it was, about you. Thus if 
your trophy was the curry-brush, you might (and did) 
if you were seen by a pirate and knew it, hastily pluck 
up a croquet hoop and begin running. Then the pirate, 
supposing that this was your trophy, ran like mad after 
you, and when he caught you, you merely assured him 
that the croquet hoop wasn't your trophy. That was a 
score, it also winded the pirate a little, and perhaps Nellie, 
going cautiously towards the croquet-lawn where her real 
mission was, would have observed this, and plucking up 
a croquet hoop (which was her true trophy) begin to run. 
On which the slightly winded pirate would leave you and 
run after Nellie, who generally screamed, thus giving 
away the fact that she had her trophy. Meantime you 
would proceed with caution towards the stable-yard, seize 
up a curry-brush and instantly hear a crash from the 
copse and find the second pirate in pursuit. Even as deep 
called unto deep the pirates would then shout to each 
other, and though you thought you could get away from 
one, the other, having captured Nellie, would appear in 
front of you. ... 

There were infinite psychological problems. Suppos- 
ing your trophy had been an apple, you would, if you 
were very cunning, put it in your pocket, and continue a 
pleasant stroll, without hurry, more or less in the direction 
of "home." Then if a fast pirate like Arthur sighted you, 
you would not run away at all, but ask him sarcastically 
if he had caught anybody yet. There was a good chance 
that he would think you had not yet got your trophy 
and would continue to follow you, till he saw another 
blockade runner looking guilty. On the other hand, he 
might conceivably suspect you had it already and clap an 



PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 99 

awful hand on your shoulder, and say, "Caught." But 
probably he preferred to watch you, for that made more 
sport, and then you would suddenly sprint for home, while 
he was off his guard. There was a bay tree round which a 
skilful dodger could score off a heavier and faster craft, 
but under no circumstances might you jump over flower- 
beds, because that led to running through them instead, 
which was ruinous to petunias. 

In the same summer-house which was "home," we also 
held a mystical "Chapter," of which Arthur was war- 
den, Nellie, Maggie and myself, sub-warden, secretary 
and treasurer, and Hugh was Henchman. The word 
"Chapter" was no doubt of Cathedral origin, and denoted 
a ceremonious meeting. We all subscribed to the funds 
of the Chapter (my mother, who was an honorary mem- 
ber, subscribed most) and the money was spent in official 
salaries, and in providing decorations, chains and crosses 
and ribands for the officials. The largest salary, which I 
think was half a crown, was drawn by Arthur as warden ; 
he also wore the most magnificent jewel, while Hugh, 
the menial, drew but the salary of one penny, and had 
a very poor gaud to console himself with. As Hench- 
man, his duty was chiefly to run errands for the rest 
of the Chapter, to summon my mother when she was 
allowed to appear, to kill wasps, and to fetch the war- 
den's straw hat. He was the only member of the Chapter 
who dared to dispute the will of the warden, and was 
known to exclaim, "Why shouldn't Fred?" (the treas- 
urer) when he was tired of running about. Even more 
subversive of canonical discipline was his assertion one 
day that he would not be a member of any more societies, 
in which he was only deputy sub-sub-bootboy. But I 
secretly (though treasurer) rather sympathized with him, 



100 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

for I considered then, and consider still, that the Chap- 
ter was rather a soft job for Arthur. It is true that he 
invented it, that he covered our symbols of office with 
sealing-wax lacquer — what has happened to sealing-wax 
lacquer all these years'? — and that he wrote out in ex- 
quisite black-letter hand the patents whereby we held 
office, signed by himself, but a salary of half a crown was 
excessive. At the meetings we had to present these pat- 
ents to him before we took our seats, and then had a short 
formal conversation in which we were "Brother Sub- 
warden, Brother Secretary" and so forth, and read the 
minutes of the last meeting, and when the presence of 
the Honorary Member was requested, Brother Henchman 
had to go to find her. Donations were made, and salaries 
were paid, but I am confident that nothing else happened. 
The Chapter was then adjourned; the orders were put 
back in a box, and we played pirates. . . . 

And yet though we played Pirates all day, and col- 
lected clouded yellows all -day, and printed the most ex- 
quisite poems as well as writing them, and held Chapters, 
and did a certain amount of holiday-task, and rode with 
my father, and drove with my mother, there was always 
time for other excitements. There was bathing in the 
Fal, there were picnics at Perran, especially when a south- 
west gale had been blowing, and from seven miles inland 
there was audible the thump of Atlantic waves on that 
bleak beach. Then in Truro itself there were great 
things to be done, for the volcanic energy of my father 
had soon kindled the county into pouring out money for 
the erection of a new Cathedral, the first that had been 
built in England since the time of the Reformation. St. 
Mary's Church was the site of it, and to-day an aisle of 
St. Mary's (the rest of a wonderfully hideous church 



PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 101 

being demolished) forms the baptistery of the Cathedral. 
The ground was cleared and foundations were dug, and 
slowly the great stately building began to rise flower-like 
from the barren soil. I do not suppose that any of us 
cared independently two straws about a Cathedral, but 
to go down there with my father, and hear him talk to 
Mr. Bubb, the Clerk of the Works, infected us with his 
noble zeal, and the rising walls got pleasingly confused 
with the rebuilding of the temple by Nehemiah, and the 
vision of the New Jerusalem. Hugh, I am certain, was 
allowed to lay a stone himself, and Mr. Bubb presented 
him with the trowel and mallet with which he had laid 
it. Or did we all lay stones'? I seem to hear my father 
say in an awestruck voice, "There, you have helped to 
build Truro Cathedral !" but I am not sure whether that 
was said to me or not, and my uncertainty is the measure, 
I am afraid, of the impression that the building of the 
Cathedral really made on me. . . . 

I wonder if it could have been otherwise, and with 
regret I do not see how it could. As his own childish 
records show, my father at my age then was a zealous 
ecclesiastic, for did he not when ripely eleven obtain the 
use in his mother's house of an empty room, which he 
converted into an oratory 1 ? There was an altar there, 
and it was hung with rubbings he had made from brasses 
in churches. This piece of childish piety was certainly 
natural to him, and as certainly there was no kind of 
priggishness in it, for he set a booby-trap over the door, 
so that his sisters should not be able to enter "his" oratory 
in his absence without being detected. He did not want 
his sisters praying there: and the booby-trap over the 
chapel door was certainly an admirable device to keep 
them out. But in none of us, nor indeed in my mother, 



102 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

was there implanted an ecclesiastical mind, not even in 
Hugh. He took orders it is true, in the English Church, 
and subsequently the Catholic Church claimed him, and 
to it and its service he gave his whole love and energy. 
But the ecclesiastical mind in him was a later develop- 
ment, for it must be remembered that before taking orders 
at all he had tried and failed to get into the Indian Civil 
Service. (He and I, at that time, used to dress up in 
nightshirts, with trousers over our shoulders to represent 
stoles, and celebrate the "rite of the Silver Cow" in our 
sitting-room at Addington. I feel sure that there was 
not any solid profanity in it: we but parodied, and that 
with great amusement, the genuflexions, the bobbings 
and bowings, the waving of a censer, considered merely 
as ridiculous pieces of ritual, but such a rite could not 
be held indicative of a reverent attitude towards ritual 
as such.) But my father's mind, even as a child, was 
strongly ecclesiastical; only his children did not share 
it, nor did my mother. Of all men and women that I 
have ever known, she was the most deeply religious in 
her realization of the pervading presence of God, but 
the garb, the habiliments of her religion were not the same 
as my father's. To him the Church and its ceremonies 
were a natural self-expression, and in that he gorgeously 
clothed his love of God. To none of us was such ex- 
pression natural, and thus his enthusiasms though they in- 
fected us to some extent were things caught from him, 
not cathedraically developed. That he missed this in all 
of us, I think could not be helped, but I do not think, at 
that time at any rate, that he missed it much, for he was 
Elijah in the whirlwind of his enthusiasms, and caught 
us all up, as in the fringes of a dust-cloud, to subside 
again when he had passed. 



PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 103 

What estranged was my continued fear of him, which 
now yields easily to analysis and dispersal, but was in 
those days regarded by me merely as an instinct, as natural 
and as incontrovertible as hunger or thirst. I under- 
stood neither him nor any part of him. I did not grasp 
the fact that the root in him as regards his children was 
his love for them, and that it was his love and nothing else 
that, at bottom, was accountable for his quickness in 
putting his finger on a fault and his sternness in rebuke. 
It was out of his love that he regarded himself so strictly 
as responsible for our mental and moral education, and 
what I thought his readiness to blame was only the watch- 
fulness of it. For instance, if, as I so well specifically 
remember, I appeared with an umbrella huddled up any- 
how in its confining elastic, he saw in that a tendency 
towards slovenliness, and he made, in the fervency of his 
wish that I should not grow up to be of slovenly habit, 
no allowance for the natural frailty of tender years. 
Trivial carelessness and unpunctuality in the same way 
were pounced upon with a severity that altogether over- 
brimmed the cup of the occasion; he saw in them (and 
his love hastened to correct) instances of a dangerous 
tendency. In consequence he brought great and formid- 
able guns to bear on small faults, which could just as 
efficiently have been visited with a light instead of a 
heavy hand. Sometimes, too, he was utterly wrong in 
his interpretation of our motives, and this gave us a 
sense of injustice; etchingly recorded on my memory, for 
instance, is a Sunday afternoon walk when Maggie and 
I pranced and ran ahead, from the mere exuberance, as 
far as I can judge, produced by a heavy meal and a fine 
day. But my father put the gloomiest interpretation on 
our antics, telling us that we were behaving thus in order 



104 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

to excite the admiration of passers-by at our agility. 
"You are saying to yourselves, 'I am Hercules, I am 
Diana,' " he witheringly observed; whereas, nothing was 
farther from our thoughts. But it was unthinkable to 
argue the point, to assure him that no similitude of that 
kind had ever suggested itself. The only course was to 
walk soberly and sedately instead of running. And since 
the lives of young children, especially if they are at all 
vividly inclined, are a chessboard of small faults, this 
fear of the rebuke, in the absence of comprehension of 
its root-cause, became a constant anxiety to us, making 
us mere smooth-faced, blue-eyed dolls in his presence, 
with set fixed movements and expressions; and when re- 
leased from it, we scampered off as if from an examination 
under a magnifying-glass. 

I do not mean to convey the idea that my father was 
continually pulling us up, for nothing is further from 
the truth. Continually we played to him, and he danced 
the most fascinating measure; continually he played to 
us, and our dancing strove to keep time with his enchant- 
ing airs. He could render us speechless with laughter at 
his inimitable mirth, or breathless with suspense at his 
stories. But all the time there was this sense that at any 
moment the mirth might cease, and that a formidable re- 
buke might be visited on an offence that we had no idea 
we had committed. But it was never any joy in fault- 
finding that prompted it: the real cause was the watch- 
fulness and responsibility of his love. How often our 
fear was ill-founded, passes enumeration, but one way 
or another, it had become a habit with all of us, except 
perhaps Nellie, for she, out of a remarkable faculty of not 
knowing at all what fear meant (except when playing 



PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 105 

Pirates) arrived at a much completer comprehension of 
my father than any of us. 

Still less did the rest of us understand those fits of 
black depression which from time to time assailed and 
overwhelmed my father, not grasping the fact that when 
they were on him, he really ceased to be himself, and was 
under a sort of obsession. They were, I imagine, as 
purely physical as a cold in the head or an ache of in- 
digestion, but during the two or three days that they lasted 
he was utterly unapproachable. He would sit through 
a meal, or take us out for a walk in a silence which if 
broken at all, was broken only by blame or irony. If 
we spoke to him, there would be no reply; if, under the 
intolerable heaviness we were silent, he would ask if 
there was nothing that interested us which he was worthy 
of hearing. . . . And all the time, as we knew later, he 
was struggling with this demoniacal load, longing to be 
rid of it, yearning to burst out of it, but possessed by it 
to the point of helplessness. While the fit was on him, 
and he was in this abnormal state, the most innocent of 
words and actions would evoke a formidable censure, 
and I suspect that three-quarters of our fear for him 
were derived from our belief that these attacks were a 
part of him, always there, and always liable to come into 
play. That was an entire mistake, though it was a natural 
one. As it was, these black fits were not incapsulated by 
us, but suffered to mingle with and make part of our 
estimate of him. That we should so have feared him, that 
we should so have made ourselves unnatural and formal 
with him, when all the time his love was streaming out 
towards us, makes a pathos so pitiful that I cannot bear 
to think of it. But there it was, and long it lasted, and 
all the time I never got a true perspective of him. We 



106 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

saw ourselves as a nervous row of pupils before a school- 
master, and all the time it was his very strictness which 
was a manifestation of his love, and his love hungered 
for ours. Our troubles and our joys, the worst of us 
and the best of us, went like homing pigeons to my 
mother, and she gave the same welcome to the one and 
to the other, and for ever treasured both. 

The relationship of each one of us to her was unique 
as regards any other of us, for each of us found exactly 
and precisely what we desired, though how often we did 
not know what we desired till she gave it us ! All her life 
she was wiser and younger than anybody else, limpid and 
bubbling, and from the first days when any of us began 
to understand what she was, she never had any blank 
surprises in store, for it was always quite obvious that 
she would understand and appreciate, and would never 
condone but always forgive. Never from first to last 
did I repent having opened my heart to her; never did I 
not repent having shut it. I do not think she ever asked 
any of us for a confidence, but the knowledge, conveyed 
in the very atmosphere of her, that she was ready, toeing 
the mark, so to speak, to run to us when the pistol fired, 
gave her that particular precision of sympathy. Did she 
scold us? Why, of course; but how her precious balms 
healed our heads ! 

Love is a stern business, and about hers there was never 
the faintest trace of sentimentality. She loved with a 
swift eagerness, and she had no warm slops to comfort 
us. But there was always the compliment of consulta- 
tion. "Now you've behaved very badly indeed," she 
would say, "Don't you think the first thing to do is to 
say you're sorry?' . . . And then with that inimitable 
breaking of her smile, "Oh, my dear, I am glad you told 



PRIVATE SCHOOL AND HOLIDAYS 107 

me." . . . And did ever any other mother at the age 
of forty run so violently in playing that strenuous game 
called, "Three knights a-riding," that she broke a sinew 
in her leg? Mine did. And did ever a mother so en- 
courage an extremely naughty boy of thirteen after a 
really dreadful interview with his father, as by giving 
him a prayer book and saying, "I shall write in it 'Where- 
withal shall a young man cleanse his ways'?' " Being 
called a young man at the age of thirteen was enough in 
itself to make him realize what an exceedingly tiresome 
child he had been. Tact! Beth used to call it "tac," 
and when I got my shoes wet through three times a day, 
or fell backwards into one of those Cornish streams she 
said, "Eh, Master Fred, but you've got no tac' !" No 
more I had. 



CHAPTER VI 



THE DUNCE S PROGRESS 



AFTER that first brilliant year at school, when I 
got so many prizes without taking any trouble, 
there ensued two extremely lean years, during which I 
took just as much trouble as before, and got nothing at 
all. For just as, physically, growing children spurt and 
are quiescent again, storing force for the next expansion, 
so mentally they have in the intervals of development 
periods of utter stagnation. I had swept, a prodigious 
infant, through all the other forms, leaving Geege and 
Davy and Daubeny mere dim fixed stars across the path 
of the comet, and then the unfortunate comet gave one 
faint "pop" and went completely out. Other boys 
straggled and struggled up to the first form, which I had 
so easily stormed, and I continued sinking through them, 
like a drowned rag, to my appointed place at the bottom. 
Agitated letters were exchanged between Waterfield and 
my father, of which I found the other day several of 
Waterfield's ; he clung to a certain forlorn optimism about 
me, but seemed puzzled to know why without positively 
neglecting my work I invariably did it worse than any- 
body in the form. He still believed me not to be stupid. 
In that quiescent period I could not assimilate any more ; 
all that I was fed with merely gave me indigestion, and 
the mental stuffing was liberally supplied to the poor 
goose, for at the end of that year I was to try for an 

108J 



THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 109 

Eton scholarship, with regard to which my prospects grew 
ever less encouraging. A drawer in Waterfield's study- 
adjoining the room where the first class was tutored was 
entirely devoted to the dreadful copies of Greek and 
Latin prose and Latin elegiacs which I produced. Week 
after week these grew and collected there, each of them 
thickly scored by Waterfield's red ink. Of one of them 
I can recall the image now; scarcely a word remained 
that was not underscored in red. But I gather that Water- 
field must have concluded that some blight other than 
carelessness and inattention was responsible for my fail- 
ures, for he never threatened me with rulers or birchings 
for them. Mentally, during those three atrocious terms, 
the only thing in which I can remember taking the slight- 
est interest was hearing him read out the piece of Eng- 
lish verse which it was our task to turn into Latin elegiacs. 
His reading was altogether beautiful; often his voice 
broke, as when he read us "Home they brought her war- 
rior dead," and, though he quite failed to instil in me 
the desire to put such verses into beautiful Latin, he in- 
tensely kindled my love of beautiful English. Similarly, 
when the Sunday divinity lesson was over and such storms 
as had raged round St. Paul's missionary journey were 
stilled, he would tell us all to make ourselves comfort- 
able, and for the rest of the hour entranced us with The 
Pilgrim's Progress. His delightful voice melodiously 
rose and fell; he asked us no inconvenient questions to 
probe the measure of our attention; his object, in which he 
strikingly succeeded, was to let us hear magnificent Eng- 
lish magnificently read, and to leave us to gather our own 
honey. 

A great event of the summer term was Waterfield's 
birthday. The whole school subscribed to give him a 



110 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

birthday present, which must have been of some value, 
for the sum of five shillings or ten shillings (I forget 
which) was charged up to every boy's bill. But we cer- 
tainly got that back again, for the birthday, kept as a 
whole holiday, was celebrated by everybody being taken 
to the Crystal Palace for the day and furnished with half 
a crown to spend as he pleased, so decidedly Waterfield 
was not "up" on the transaction. A few of the more 
favoured were invited to spend the day on the Thames 
with him and his family; they embarked on a steam 
launch at Richmond and had luncheon in some riverside 
wood. Now, above all things in the world I longed to 
see the Crystal Palace, of which I had formed the image 
as of some ineffable glittering constellation, a piece of 
real fairyland fallen from the sky and now at rest on 
Sydenham Hill, and it was with a black despair that I 
received the distinction of being bidden to the family 
picnic instead. But a dea ex machina came to the rescue 
in the person of Mrs. Waterfield, who quite ironically 
said to me, "I suppose you would much sooner go to the 
Crystal Palace?" Throwing "tac" and politeness to the 
winds, I unhesitatingly told her that I certainly would, 
and I was given my half-crown and joined the proletariat. 
... Or was Mrs. Waterfield's enquiry not ironical at all, 
but a piece of supreme "tac'"? Had some hint reached 
her that I really wanted to go to the Crystal Palace? 
I cannot decide. In any case, that kind-hearted woman 
would have been rewarded for making the suggestion, 
could she have realized with what rapture I beheld that 
amazing edifice glittering in the sun, and went through 
its Palm Court and its Egyptian Court and its Assyrian 
Court, and beheld all that the Prince Consort had done 
to educate the love of beauty in these barbarous islanders. 



THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 111 

All day I wandered enchanted, and laid out most of the 
half-crown in a glass paper-weight with a picture of the 
Crystal Palace below, and the remainder in a small nickel 
ornament in the shape of an ewer, undoubtedly made in 
Germany. Indeed, I was wise to fasten on the oppor- 
tunity given me by Mrs. Waterfield, for thus I secured 
the wonderful experience of being absolutely bowled 
over by the beauty of the Crystal Palace, which has not 
happened to everybody. All the same, I suffered a few 
years later a crushing and double disillusionment, for I 
was taken there again to hear Israel in Egypt at the 
Handel Festival. On that occasion my main impression 
was that I thought the Crystal Palace a very suitable place 
for that monstrous performance. The scale on which the 
one was built and on which the other was performed 
served not to conceal but to accentuate the essential 
meanness of each. . . . 

I weave this into a digression not unconnected with 
the first of these lean years. Though mentally, as re- 
gards the metres of foreign verse and the inexorable gram- 
mar of Greek and Latin, I was as idle "as a painted ship 
upon a painted ocean," I gorged myself not only on the 
readings of Waterfield, but on music. That frail widow, 
Mrs. Russell, is probably unknown to fame as a teacher 
of the piano, but I owe her an undying debt of gratitude. 
I begged to be released from the study of such works 
as those of Mr. Diabelli, whom I had long ago judged 
and found wanting, and from "arrangements" of the 
Barber of Seville, and even from the sugared melodies 
of "Songs without Words" (over which, especially No. 
8, an occasional tear used to drop frbm Mrs. Russell's 
eyes), and to be allowed to entrap my awkward ringers 
in Bach, whom I had heard rendered by the "Farmer 



112 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

Society" at Lincoln. My request was granted, and I was 
permitted to make a rapturous hash of slow Sarabands 
and more rapid Gavottes and Minuets out of the Suites 
Anglais es. Never was there so enthralled a bungler; for 
I could hear (this I positively affirm), through the crash 
of my awkwardness, what was meant. Bach then and 
there and ever afterwards was my gold standard in the 
innumerable coinage of music. There was good silver, 
there was good copper, there was promissory paper. All 
these, in a loose metaphor, might temporarily be depreci- 
ated in the exchange of my mind, or might have a rise, 
but Bach remained gold. Out of my "taste," whatever 
that was, I was quite prepared to put Beethoven (in slow 
movements) in his place, and to give Mozart, as judged 
by his "Variations on a Theme in A," a very dis- 
tinguished position, and to concede a neatness to "The 
Harmonious Blacksmith." Brahms I had never heard 
of. But all these, then as now, were, at the most, dis- 
tinguished gentlemen, equerries or grooms or chamber- 
lains in attendance round about the court, and having 
speech with the King. 

By the time I heard Israel in Egypt at the Handel 
Festival, I had also heard the St. Matthew Passion at 
St. Paul's, and I quite definitely compared them. Prob- 
ably it is a mistake ever to compare one achievement with 
another even if they are built on an appeal to the same 
sense : it is no more use comparing Handel with Bach than 
it is comparing a sunset with the view of the Bernese 
Oberland. But, taken by itself, that performance of 
Israel in Egypt seemed to me a monstrous attempt to 
cover up a commdn invention by inflating it with noise. 
The fact that there were four thousand (or perhaps four 
million) singers all bawling, "He gave them hailstones 



THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 113 

for rain," did not essentially make the hailstorm one 
whit the stormier, though the immensity of the row 
pleasantly stunned the senses. It would be as unreason- 
able to take a carte-de-visite photograph of a man with a 
stupid mouth and a chin-beard, and hope to make it im- 
pressive by enlarging it to the size of the Great Pyramid. 
Indeed, the bigger the enlargement, the sorrier would be 
the result. But by that time I had the sense to see how 
delicate and delightful an artist is Handel when he con- 
fines himself to the limits of his true territory. For sweet- 
ness and neatness of melody, in the violin sonata in A, 
the piano sonatas, and songs from countless operas, I 
knew he had no rival — in the silver standard. But no 
one, with the one exception of Bach, has ever defeated 
the awful limitations of the "form" of oratorio, and, as 
a rule, the larger the orchestra, the more stupendous the 
body of voice, the more shaky becomes the credit of the 
composer. Indeed, the very fact that so gigantic a rep- 
resentation as a Crystal Palace Handel Festival was ever 
desired or enjoyed postulates not only a complete want 
of musical perception on the part of the public, but a cor- 
responding want of musical achievement on the part of 
Handel. No one would deny that the "Hailstone 
Chorus" sounds better when a huge band and an immense 
chorus all produce the utmost noise of which they are 
capable. We all like hearing a quantity of voices and a 
Nebuchadnezzar-band thundering out commonplace 
melodies, because a loud and tuneful noise has a stimulat- 
ing effect on the nerves, and because we like our ears 
(occasionally) to be battered into a hypnotized submis- 
sion. But we submit not to the magic of the music, but 
to the overpowering din of its production. And when 
"the feast is over and the lamps expire," when we have 



114 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

had "the louder music and the stronger wine" of noise, 
our hearts steal back to the spell of Cynara. . . . 

Soon after that first enthralling day at the Crystal 
Palace came the scholarship examination at Eton, which, 
as far as I was concerned, produced no prize whatever. I 
spent a delightful three days there, basking in the efful- 
gence of Arthur, then just eighteen and demi-godlike, 
and came back to Temple Grove after a pleasant outing. 
And at the end of that term Waterfield retired, and I went 
back in September to be tutored again for more scholar- 
ships. 

The new headmaster, Mr. Edgar, previously conducted 
a boarding-house, and was hitherto distinguished for a 
very long clerical coat, two most amiable daughters, a 
gold-rimmed eyeglass which he used to clean by inserting 
it in his mouth and then wiping it on his handkerchief, 
and the most remarkable hat ever seen. The nucleus of 
it, that is to say the part he wore on his head, was of hard 
black felt, like the ordinary bowler, but it was geometric- 
ally, quite round, so that he could put any part of it any- 
where. That I know because I have so often tried it on 
myself. Outside that circular nucleus came an extremely 
broad black felt rim, far wider than that of the shadiest 
straw hat, and turning upwards on all sides in what I can 
only describe as a "saucy" curve. As worn by Edgar, it 
produced an impression of indescribable levity, just as 
if he was, say, Mr. George Robey posing as a parson. His 
amiability was unbounded, and his driving-power that 
of a wad of cotton-wool. Indeed, he was so pleasant that 
for his sake it became the fashion to fall in love with either 
of his two daughters, whose mission was to influence us 
for good. They gave us strawberries, and tried to get 



THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 115 

between us and the soft spring-showers of their father's 
disapproval, like unnecessary umbrellas. 

Under Edgar's beneficent sway, I managed to get into 
the most complicated row that ever schoolboy found him- 
self immersed in, for I committed three capital (or rather 
fundamental) offences in one joyous swoop. In the first 
place, I concealed five shillings of sterling silver about 
my person, though all cash derived from "tips" had to be 
given up to the matron, and by her doled out as she 
thought suitable. This clandestine millionaire thereupon 
bribed a fellow-conspirator to break bounds and go into 
Richmond, there to spend four of those shillings in Turk- 
ish delight, and keep the fifth for his trouble. He got 
back safely, and three friends had a wonderful feast in 
the dormitory that night, all sitting on my bed, and cloy- 
ing ourselves and the bedclothes with that delicious sweet- 
meat. Unfortunately there was amongst those midnight 
revellers one stomach so effete and spiritless that it re- 
volted at the administration of these cloying lumps, and, 
prostrated with sickness, the owner of it confessed to an 
unusual indulgence, while the state of my sheets com- 
pleted the evidence. The chain went back link by link 
from his sickness to my bed, and from my bed to the 
finding of the empty Turkish delight box, and from the 
Turkish delight to the place it came from, and from the 
place it came from to the money wherewith it was 
purchased, so that I was left in as the unrivalled culprit 
in the reconstructed story. But though I should have 
swooned with anxiety and probably confessed all, had 
Waterfield been the Sherlock Holmes, I never gave a 
moment's thought to Edgar's unravelling. He said I 
had been very naughty, and sucked his eyeglass, and 
hoped I wouldn't be naughty again. It was all very 



116 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

polite and pleasant, and I knew I had nothing to fear 
from him. But even at the time I had a secret misgiv- 
ing as to the Judgment Book that should soon be opened 
at this page. The best thing, probably, that I could 
have done would have been to write home instantly and 
tell my father all about it, for that would certainly have 
seemed to him the proper course, and also he would have 
blown off part of his displeasure in a letter. But I con- 
tinued to procrastinate, and before many weeks the term 
mildly ebbed away. Then with a sudden crescendo my 
misgivings increased, and it was a very unholiday-minded 
urchin who went back that December for Christmas at 
Truro. 

About now my fear of my father was at its perihelion, 
and morning by morning I used to come downstairs, a 
quarter of an hour before breakfast time, to look at the 
post which had arrived, and see if among the letters for 
him there was one with the Mortlake postmark and the 
"Temple Grove" inscription on its flap. Some morning 
soon, I knew, my report on the term's work and my con- 
duct generally would come, and in it, no doubt, would 
be an allusion to this escapade. Edgar had treated it 
so lightly that it was still just possible that he would 
not allude to it in his report, but that possibility was not 
seriously entertained. Morning by morning I turned over 
the letters, while my father was at early service, and 
then one day, while Christmas was nearly on us, I saw 
with a sinking of the heart that the fatal letter had ar- 
rived. What added to the terror of it was that my father 
was in a fit of black depression. 

He did not open his letters at breakfast, and afterwards 
I went out into the garden in pursuit of an entrancing 
game just invented, that concerned a large circular thicket 



THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 117 

of escalonia which grew near the front door. There was 
an "It," who at a signal started in pursuit round the 
bush to catch Hugh and me, and "It" on this occasion was 
Nellie. She came running round the curve of the bush 
and set us flying off in the opposite direction, still keeping, 
by the rule of the game, close to the bush. Then, when 
she had got us really moving, she would double back with 
the design that we should still, running in that direction, 
rush into her very arms and be caught. Full speed astern 
was the only thing that could save us. . . . In the middle 
of this out came the butler, who said that my father 
wanted to see me at once. "Come out again quickly," 
called Nellie. 

My father was sitting in his study with an open letter 
in his hand. I think he gave it me to read ; in any case, 
Mr. Edgar had been sufficiently explicit, and in all my 
life I have never been so benumbed with fear. . . . Had 
I committed the most heinous of moral crimes my father 
could not have made a blacker summing-up. He said 
that he would not see me among the rest of his children. 
I was to have my meals alone and disgraced upstairs, and 
to take no part in their games or in their society, and 
away I went battered and yet inwardly rebelling against 
this appalling sentence. Then I think my mother or 
Nellie must have pleaded, for I was allowed to go out 
for a walk with Nellie alone that afternoon, but was 
segregated from the others. I was still bewildered with 
the fierceness of my father's displeasure, and took it for 
granted that I must have done something unintelligibly 
wicked, for I asked Nellie if she had ever done anything 
so dreadful as the crime of which I had been guilty. She 
said she had not, so I drew the inference that her theft 
of dried plants from my collection (which, after all, was 



118 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

a violation of one of the commandments) was venial. 
But it was precious on that black afternoon to receive 
sympathy at all, which certainly she gave me, and I did 
not risk the loss of it by enquiring about the comparative 
wickedness of the "Affair Turkish delight" and theft. 

Then on Christmas Eve, which I think must have been 
next day, came one of those unutterable brightnesses 
which my father always had in store. Again he sent for 
me, and I went stiff and resigned,. not knowing whether 
there was not to be some renewal of his anger. ... In- 
stead, he put me in an armchair close by the fire and 
wrapped a rug round my knees, and asked if I was quite 
comfortable, and shared with me the tea that had been 
brought in for him, since he was too busy to come into 
the nursery as usual and have it with the rest of us. And 
then he somehow gave me a glimpse, sitting tucked up by 
the fire, of the love that was at the base of his severity. 
How, precisely, he conveyed that I cannot tell, but there 
was no more doubt about it than there was about the 
heaviness of his displeasure. 

The remaining two terms at Temple Grove passed 
along pleasantly. In school work I continued my slow 
placid gravitation to the bottom of my form, as other 
boys were promoted into it and took their places below 
me. I sank gently through them and came calmly to rest 
at a position where no fresh sinking was possible. There 
I went in for a little more sleep, "a little slumber, a 
little folding of the hands in sleep," and resisted with the 
passive force of mere inertia any attempt to raise me. 
But probably vital forces were beginning to stir again, 
for I got free of the successive childish ailments which had 
been afflicting me — colds, sore throats, earaches and tooth- 
aches — all of which no doubt added their contribution to 




E. F. BENSON, JET. 19 



Wage 119 



THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 121 

my general apathy, and also I woke to a violent interest 
in friendship, steam-engines, and poetry. The last of 
these I take to have been due to the fructification of the 
seed sown by Waterfield's readings, and, with Carring- 
ton's translation of the "^Eneid" to help, it is a fact that 
I produced in an American cloth-covered notebook a 
complete and rhymed and rhythmical rendering of the 
third "iEneid" which we were working at in school, with- 
out caring one jot for the merits of the original Latin. 
What I wanted to do was to compose a quantity of Eng- 
lish myself, and compose it I did, glorying in the speed 
of its production, quite careless about the faithfulness of 
the rendering or the accuracy of the grammar, and the 
only merit it can possibly have had was that it was a 
labour of love. Other poems dashed off in the intervals 
of this epic were connected with friendship, for I con- 
ceived a violent adoration for a boy of the same standing 
as myself, romantic to the highest degree in that I gave 
him a whole-hearted devotion, but quite devoid of mawk- 
ishness or sentimentality. To him I addressed rhymed 
odes, and then we quarrelled and made it up again, with 
more odes, for he addressed me also in flowing stanzas. 
Then there was a parody of Hood's "Song of the Shirt," 
held to be a devastatingly comic piece ; and not less comic 
I suspect was a blank verse lament by a mother over the 
death of her only son. 

Not very far behind poetry and friendship as objects of 
existence came steam-engines, my fellow-engineer sitting 
next me, bottom but one of the form. We got illustrated 
catalogues from the makers of models, and copied and 
recopied diagrams of slide-valves, waste pipes, and ec- 
centrics with a zeal and accuracy which, if devoted to 
lessons, must speedily have pulled us out of the humble 



122 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

positions we so contentedly occupied. A certain geo- 
graphical jealousy was mixed up in this, since, though 
we both condemned the engines on the South-Western, on 
which line was Mortlake, as very poor and flimsy mecha- 
nisms, he, whose home was reached by the Great Northern, 
considered the engines on that line far superior to any- 
thing that the Great Western, which took me to and from 
Truro, had to show. He drew pictures of the Great 
Northern express engines, and I retorted with sketches of 
the "Flying Dutchman" (1145 a.m. from Paddington), 
which went to Swindon without a stop and ran on a broad 
gauge, while the Great Northern was only a narrow 
gauge. Against that he set the fact that Peterborough 
was a mile further from London than was Swindon. . . . 
He was the happy possessor of a model locomotive with 
slide-valve cylinders and a waste-pipe going up the chim- 
ney, and though I could not run to that, by dint of saving 
up and of my mother's anticipation of my birthday, I 
became possessor of another model with a copper boiler 
and a brass chassis called the "Dart." The "Dart" had 
only oscillating cylinders, which, as all the world knows, 
do not discharge their waste steam up the funnel, but 
from small holes at their base, and have this further in- 
firmity, that they only have one steam-driven stroke in 
each revolution of their fly-wheel, whereas a slide-valve 
cylinder has two. The slide-valve engine, therefore, was 
of a different class altogether from the "Dart," but I 
found that I could get up a very powerful head of steam 
in the "Dart" by stuffing small pellets of blotting-paper 
up the safety-valve, so that she held her breath while her 
rival was letting off steam. Then, when for fear of a 
burst boiler I said the "Dart" was ready, and turned on 
the tap that conveyed the steam to the cylinder, she would 



THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 123 

start off like mad, and for a few yards easily outrun her 
more powerful rival. But long before she got to the 
end of the open-air cloisters where these races took place 
she would be overhauled; and, indeed, the "Dart" usually 
failed to run a complete course, and had to be bottled up 
again to develop fresh energy. But inferior as the "Dart" 
was in staying power, it must be accounted unto her for 
righteousness that she never burst when her safety-valve 
was stopped up. There was also a stationary engine 
(oscillating cylinder) belonging to one of us, but we un- 
fortunately burned its bottom out by neglecting to put 
any water in the boiler. 

Friendship, engines, and poetry, then, were the safety- 
valves — not choked with blotting-paper like that of the 
much-enduring "Dart" — through which my growing 
vitality discharged itself, and I used to lie awake at night, 
making rhymes and phrases and thinking of the friend of 
my heart, and trying to devise some plan by which the 
"Dart" should generate a more abundant supply of steam. 
To these objects of existence, when the summer term be- 
gan, was added cricket, but never did my school work 
arouse one ounce of latent energy, even though scholarship 
time was coming near again. If I can recollect my atti- 
tude rightly, I was entirely without ambition as regards 
winning a scholarship, in the sense that I chose to devote 
myself to Latin and Greek with a view to subsequently 
obtaining one. It is true that I wanted, rather, to go to 
Eton, and knew that I should not be sent there unless I 
got a scholarship, but for that end I did not divert my 
energies from friendship, steam-engines, and poetry. I 
think I am correct in this recollection, for in all the years 
that have passed since then I cannot remember ever being 
nearly so much interested in the future as in the present. 



124 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

The actual interest blazing within me (and there were 
often several respectable conflagrations going on) has 
always seemed to me of far vaster importance than a re- 
moter goal. I do not mean that I was fitful in my in- 
tentions, because I certainly pursued the same object for 
years together; only it was not for the ultimate achieve- 
ment that I pursued it, but because I was continuously in- 
terested in the same thing. That the opposite line of 
action is the most effective and brings the biggest results 
I do not deny, but, on the other hand, think of the wild 
and fugitive acquisitions that fall to the lot of the short- 
range strategist. . . . But I am not defending my con- 
duct, in any case, but merely describing it. 

My own lack of effective ambition must have been ter- 
ribly disappointing to the elders who had formed and, in 
a material sense, directed this scholarship campaign. Mr. 
Edgar and my father agreed on a tremendous programme, 
which I was to carry out, and the "general idea" was this. 
There was a scholarship examination at Marlborough in 
June or perhaps early in July, in which there were of- 
fered for competition some half-dozen scholarships, with 
a great plum at the top called the "House Scholarship." 
The House Scholarship was worth, I think, £80 a year, 
the next six £50, and my father in a letter he wrote me 
shortly before the event said that he did not think the 
great plum was out of my reach. His main desire, I 
know, was that I should achieve a distinction, but I am 
also sure that he felt I ought to do something to help 
towards the expenses of my education, since he believed 
that I was capable of so doing. He was not a rich man ; 
hitherto his sons Martin and Arthur had won scholar- 
ships which made their education at Winchester and Eton 
a matter of small expense, and he did not mean to send 



THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 125 

me to Eton, as the event proved, unless I got a scholar- 
ship, but to a much cheaper but in no way less excellent 
school. I was, therefore, in the examination at Marl- 
borough to get a scholarship of some sort — the House 
Scholarship for choice — and then, a few weeks later, to 
go up for Eton. If I got a scholarship there, I was to be 
sent there instead of Marlborough, but, failing that, to 
accept the laurels which Marlborough would no doubt 
have offered me. 

So first I went off to Marlborough and competed there. 
I didn't carry off the House Scholarship, nor did I carry 
off any other scholarship, nor was my name mentioned 
as having approached to distinction, and so Eton was 
given its chance without any back-thought at having 
wiped Marlborough's eye. Once again, therefore, I com- 
peted sadly at Eton, and Eton had precisely the same 
opinion of me as it had had a year before. The plan of 
campaign had completely failed, and it was settled that 
I should unconditionally surrender to Marlborough. I 
did not in the least want to go there, because I wanted to 
go to Eton, as far as I wanted anything at all apart from 
friendship, steam-engines, and poetry. Certainly I did 
not want to remain at Temple Grove any longer, for my 
greatest friend had won a scholarship at Winchester, and 
the steam-engine friend was off to Harrow, and another 
person who mattered had been successful at Eton. But 
the idea of Marlborough was not without charm, for a 
year before another friend had gone there, and I looked 
forward with a certain excitement to seeing him again. 
We had met during the days of the scholarship examina- 
tion, and he had aroused in me some shy sort of adora- 
tion. He had grown tall and handsome, and asked con- 
descendingly about Temple Grove and the odious habit 



126 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

of keeping stag-beetles, yet with a certain personal in- 
terest that he veiled behind a splendid manly brusqueness. 
I wondered whether he would appreciate a short ode, but 
decided that he would not. But he called me a "decent 
little kid," which I liked as coming from so magnificent a 
being. 

Temple Grove ended very soon after that in a general 
dammerung of failure. Faute de mieux I was to be sent 
to Marlborough, and throwing a Latin dictionary care- 
lessly into my locker, I squashed my gigantic stag-beetle 
quite flat, and he was as Og the King of Bashan. On the 
last day of the term I played cricket against a team of 
Old Templegrovians and lost the match by failing to 
hold the easiest catch ever spooned up amid a wildly 
excited circle of contemporaries, having previously got 
out first ball (or second). But Mr. Edgar was kind, and 
said that it didn't matter, though his frenzied sucking of 
his eyeglass and his dropping it into my lemonade in- 
dicated tact rather than sincerity. 

So the poor ugly duckling who had failed to accomplish 
anything went home to its family of swans, who, daz- 
zlingly white, cut circles in the air above it on the pinions 
of their various accomplishments. There was Arthur, 
now nineteen, who had got an Eton scholarship at King's 
College, Cambridge, and was going there in October, 
whose scholastic success was only equalled by his volleys 
with an Eton football and his wholly untakeable service 
at lawn-tennis. He could do everything with ease, was 
listened to by my father with attention when he talked, 
and yet remained unconscious of his sovereignty, and was 
altogether kind and faintly pitiful to my all-round short- 
comings. There was Nellie, who annexed every distinc- 



THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 127 

tion that could be annexed at the Truro High School, ex- 
cept when Maggie butted up against her, who could play 
Schumann's first novelette and had been pronounced to 
have a "veiled" contralto voice in which she sang melo- 
dies by Marzials and Molloy, and who, on the occasion 
of Redruth High School or some inferior congregation of 
females challenging Truro High School for a match at 
cricket, bowled out the entire side of those misguided 
young ladies with lobs that cut the daisies from their 
stalks and were admired even by the vanquished for their 
paralyzing swiftness. Then there was Maggie, who took 
the rest of the prizes at the High School and painted 
ravishly not only in water-colours, but in oils, with Mc- 
Guilp (was it 1 ?) as a medium, and tubes that squirted 
rainbows on to her palette. She was not athletic, but 
she had the great physical distinction of having been 
knocked down by a cow whose calf had been taken from 
her, and lying prone on the ground held on to the animal's 
horns and with perfect calmness continued to scream 
loudly and serenely until rescued by Parker the butler. 
After these dazzling swans there came the ugly duckling, 
who had failed in games and in scholarship, who had 
not achieved the smallest intellectual distinction, but who 
in some queer manner of his own was quite as independ- 
ent as any of the swans. 

And, finally, there was Hugh, on whom at this time 
my father's hopes were centred, for I think he regarded 
him as the one who was going to take Martin's place. 
If he listened with respect to Arthur, he hung on Hugh, 
who, for independence, for knowing what he wanted, and 
for a perfectly fearless disregard of other people's opin- 
ions, was, for a boy of nine, wholly unique. If his reason 
was convinced, he would adopt a plan different from the 



128 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

one he had chosen, but it was necessary to convince him 
first, and no amount of bawling or insistence would make 
him alter his mind if he did not agree. He adored Beth, 
but if he chose to walk through puddles, neither affection 
for her, nor respect for her authority, would make him 
cease to do so, unless she convinced him of the greater 
suitability of the dry places. He was so dreadfully funny 
that nobody could possibly be angry with him for long, 
and when he had reduced a sister, who was teaching him 
his lessons, to distraction by his disobediences and inat- 
tention, he would anticipate the final threat the moment 
before it came, and, with shut eyes and a face inexpressi- 
bly solemn, would chant, "Mamma shall be told !" Arthur 
alone out of us all could deal with him. Once, when in 
some theatrical rehearsal, Hugh, with soft paper round a 
comb, had to supply orchestral accompaniment to the 
piano, and wouldn't stop, Arthur observed in an awful 
voice, "If the orchestra isn't quiet, it shall be sent out of 
the room with several hard slaps." . . . Hugh had a 
habit, when things were breezy, of writing insulting re- 
marks in round hand on a piece of paper, and then doub- 
ling it up and throwing it at the object of his scorn, and 
while you were reading it he ran away. A further de- 
velopment of this was that, when pursuit was hot behind 
him, he would pull a small ball of paper out of his 
pocket and surreptitiously drop it, as if fearing to be 
caught with it. Naturally, the pursuer stopped to smooth 
out the paper and see what fresh insult was recorded there, 
and would find a perfectly blank half-sheet. But by that 
time Hugh would be at the top end of the garden path 
and have had time to conceal himself anywhere. Clad 
in pasteboard armour, covered with silver paper, with 
a shield and a helmet and greaves, he would hide in the. 



THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 129 

shrubbery and hurl paper lances at you. Then a hot pur- 
suit followed, until one of the greaves dropped off, and, 
still flying, he would pant out "Pax, until I've put on 
my greave again !" He and I lived in a perpetual high- 
tension atmosphere of violent quarrels, swift reconcilia- 
tions, and indissoluble alliances with secret signs and 
mysteries to which even Maggie was not admitted. We 
had a cypher language of our own which consisted in 
substituting for each vowel the one that came next in 
the alphabet; it was easy to write, but difficult to speak 
and even more difficult to understand when spoken. 
What we communicated to each other in it I have no con- 
ception, nor can I now remember the aims and objects of 
the mystic club called "Mr. Paido." One of the rites 
consisted in walking in the garden with bare feet, which, 
after all, was an adventure in itself. 

The great excitement of this summer holiday, after 
which I was to go to Marlborough, was an expedition to 
Switzerland. All that any of us knew about Switzerland 
was a remarkable picture that hung in the nursery in 
which rows of dazzling summits crowned cerulean lakes. 
Above that panoramic view, in which the Jungfrau and 
Mont Blanc somehow appeared together, were little vi- 
gnettes, one of a Swiss chalet, one of the Staubbach, one 
of the castle at Chillon. We journeyed via Southamp- 
ton and Havre, five children, Beth, my father and mother, 
and sat upright in a second-class carriage all the way from 
Paris to Berne, by what route I have no idea. Our ob- 
jective was a village called Gimmelwald, a few miles 
from Murren, and we spent a day and a night at Berne, 
and from Berne, on the terrace in front of the church, 
I had my first glimpse of snow mountains. Perhaps 
because I had been sitting bolt upright all night, perhaps 



130 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

because I had thought that the brilliant blues and daz- 
zling whites of the pictures in the nursery would be col- 
lectively unveiled on an enormous scale, I was more dis- 
appointed than words can fairly convey. Low on the 
horizon were a few greyish jagged hills beset with stream- 
ers of mist, and that was all. Nellie drew a long breath 
and said, "Oh, isn't it wonderful!" and I labelled her 
the most consummate hypocrite. 

Next morning we started again, and came out on the 
lake of Thun, the shores of which we traversed in some 
sort of train like an omnibus, with an open top, and in 
due proportion to the bitterness of the disappointment at 
Berne came that day's rapture. We passed below the 
Niesen, which wore a snow-cap, and my mother told us 
that the Niesen was nothing particular. Summits gleamed 
from the other side of the lake, and they were nothing 
particular; but oh! for the lake itself, while we awaited 
other incredible developments. It was bluer than the 
picture in the nursery, and it was trimmed with a trans- 
lucent bottle-green that showed the shallow water, and 
sharp as the edge of a riband laid against it came that 
deep clear blue. From Interlaken we proceeded in car- 
riages, between meadows tall with gentians, and over 
them there skimmed Apollo butterflies with orange spots 
on each under-wing, and Camberwell Beauties no less 
(foreign variety, with a yellow instead of a white border 
to their wings). And then we turned a corner (I was on 
the front seat), and Nellie opposite said, "Oh!" and I 
thought she had been a hypocrite again and didn't look 
round, because I was observing a pale clouded yellow. 
And then she said, "Oh, look!" and I was kind enough 
to forgive her her hypocrisies and look, and there, straight 
jn front, was the Jungfrau, and the holy maiden was 



THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 131 

unveiled white and tall above her skirt of dark pine 
woods, and my heart went out to the snow mountains, 
and has never yet come back. Much did I suffer at their 
lovely hands during the next ten years, for that same 
Jungfrau treated me to an excruciating climb of many 
hours through soft snow; and the Matterhom kept his 
worshipper interminably standing with one foot planted 
on exiguous icy steps as each was hewn out by the leading 
guide and the fragments went clinking down the preci- 
pice; and the Rothorn (Zienal) gave me a very awkward 
moment on the edge of a bergschrund; and the Piz Palu 
came within an ace of causing Hugh to die of syncope 
owing to the icy wind with which she enwrapped her 
arete, and the Matterhom for the second time threw a 
large quantity of boulders at me because I inconspicuously 
crossed her eastern face on my way towards the Theodul 
Pass; and the Dent Blanche directed so damnable a bliz- 
zard at me that I could not make her further acquaint- 
ance. But, as David said, "though all these things were 
done against me," yet has my heart never returned to me 
from the keeping of the great mountains, nor yet from 
the keeping of the sea which I first saw at Skegness, and 
if I could choose the manner of my death it would be 
that I should, above some eminent ice-wall, fall asleep 
in the immaculate purity of starlit frost, or sink in the 
sea-caves round about the island of Capri, and, as I 
sank, see from far below the glitter of the southern sun 
above me in the clear dusk of deep waters. ... If God 
pleases, I will be frozen or drowned when the time comes 
for me to have done with this body of mine. I do not 
covet for its last moment a comfortable bed, and pyjamas, 
and a medicine bottle on the washstand. . . . Not that 
it matters; only I should like the other mode of passage. 



132 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

We passed the Staubbach somewhere near Lauter- 
brunnen and came in the hour of sunset to the little inn 
at Gimmelwald. And then there was no more spirit left 
in me, for Eiger and Monck and Jungfrau and Ebneflu 
and Silberhorn were aflame with the salute of the evening. 
Maggie sat down to sketch, and was prodigal of rose- 
madder; but whereas she put rose-madder on to a draw- 
ing-block, it was the sun that dyed the snows. And we 
had bilberries and cream at dinner, and cows went home, 
swinging bronze bells as they cropped a wayside morsel ; 
and there was a noise of falling torrents and a scent of 
pasturage, and the exitement of being "abroad" and the 
knowledge that the Jungfrau would be there in the morn- 
ing. 

I wish I could estimate even in the roughest manner 
the amount of luggage which accompanied that month 
in Switzerland. My father had a heavy box of books 
and manuscript, for he was working, then as always, when 
he saw leisure ahead of him, on his Life of St. Cyprian, 
which he began at Wellington and completed only shortly 
before his death. Cyprian alone took up a large box, and, 
apart from that in the way of books, there must have 
been a great library. There were certainly half a dozen 
copies of Shakespeare, because of an evening after din- 
ner we read Shakespeare aloud, each taking a character; 
and there was a quantity of Dickens, which my mother 
read to us before dinner. Then each of us had some kind 
of a holiday task, except Arthur. Nellie had something 
about logic, and Maggie had her political economy, and 
I had a large Latin dictionary and a large Greek diction- 
ary to elucidate Virgil and the "Medea" of Euripides, 
and Hugh had, at any rate, a Latin grammar and a 
volume called "Nuces," which means "nuts," and hard 



THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 133 

they were for him to crack. Everybody, individually, 
had a Bible and prayer-book and hymn-book, and I am 
sure there must have been some Sunday books as well. 
Then the materials for "collections" came along also: 
there were presses for each of us in which to receive and 
to dry the flowers we picked, and there were killing bottles 
for butterflies (not chloroform and oxalic acid any more) 
containing cyanide of potassium, which killed after you 
had screwed the lid on, and when you took it off next 
morning, they were all dead bodies, like Sennacherib's 
hosts; and setting boards for the laying out of the slain, 
and large cork-lined boxes for their exhibition, and 
packets of pins for their impalement, and many butterfly 
nets for their original capture. Then there were packs 
of cards for diversion, and my mother had a great medi- 
cine-chest in case of illness. There were cool clothes for 
all of us in the blaze of the Alpine day, and warm clothes 
for the chill of the Alpine evenings; and each of us had 
a paint-box and a "Winsor and Newton" block, and 
Beth never moved without rolls of flannel and mustard 
plasters and cylinders of cotton-wool. Each one of us 
had an alpen-stock and huge hob-nailed boots, and 
when you consider that there were eight persons, each 
marvellously equipped for mental, physical, and artistic 
enterprises, you must only wonder that some mode of 
conveyance, if not all, was not fit to bear the strain of 
this transportation. But arrive at Gimmelwald we did, 
and while Maggie was prodigal with rose-madder this 
train of equipment somehow got inside the inn. Beth 
swooped on her flannel and her mustard plasters, my 
father established his Cyprian library in our sitting-room, 
my mother clutched her medicine-chest, and there was 
left an enormous pile of books, apparatus for botany, 



134 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

climbing, and entomology, which remained in a passage 
and was gradually broken up between its owners. I think 
that the last pressing-case for dried flowers, the last kill- 
ing-bottle for the extinction of butterflies, can hardly have 
been clawed from that common heap before it was time 
to pack it all up again. 

Of that month certain indelibly vivid impressions re- 
main. One was the ascent of the Schilthorn, popularly 
supposed to be 10,000 (ten thousand) feet in height, and 
to possess the witching attraction of owning "everlasting" 
snow. It was not, unless it has abbreviated itself very 
much since, anything near ten thousand feet high, and, 
as for the everlasting snow, we climbed through torrid 
uplands and finished by a mild rocky ascent without ever 
setting foot on any snow perishable or everlasting. True, 
there were patches of it on the northern face, and per- 
haps those may be there still. But it was an enchanting 
expedition, for we carried our alpen-stocks and the guide 
had a rope round his shoulders, and we started at five 
in the morning. My father had a guide-book with a 
Schilthorn panorama, and we sat on the top and rejoiced 
in the fact that we were ten thousand feet up in the 
air and that small quantities of everlasting snow were 
below us, and we followed his guiding finger as he pointed 
out the jewels in the crown of mountains that surrounded 
us. . . . We passed through Murren on the way down, 
and there saw English people playing lawn-tennis on one 
of the hotel courts, and never shall I forget my father's 
upraised eyebrows and mouth of scorn as he said, "Fancy, 
playing lawn-tennis in sight of the Jungf rau !" 

But if there was some subtle profanity in playing lawn- 
tennis in sight of the Jungfrau, I thought it much more 
blasphemous to study "Medea" and the "iEneid" in the 



THE DUNCE'S PROGRESS 135 

same sacred presence. I had a considerable spell of these, 
because it had been discovered that, although I was going 
to Marlborough without a scholarship, there was yet 
another of those odious competitions which I could enter 
for after I had got there. I had fondly thought that 
after this trinity of failures I had thoroughly be-dunced 
myself and need make no more efforts, but it appeared 
that I was wholly mistaken, for next December there 
would be a chance of going in for Foundation Scholar- 
ships at my new school, and in that there would be less 
competition, for they were open only to sons of clergy- 
men. So, after a few days' holiday, out came the Greek 
dictionary and the Latin dictionary and the "Medea" 
and the "iEneid," and I had a couple of hours every 
morning under my father's tuition. I think he was very 
strict with me, for he still believed in the existence of 
my brains, and was determined that I should use them. 
But it is impossible to get good results from a small boy 
unless somehow interest is kindled, and there was often 
despair on the part of the teacher and resentful gloom 
on the part of the taught. Things came to a climax on 
one particular wet morning, when we were all seated in 
the sitting-room, Nellie with her logic, and Maggie with 
her political economy, and Hugh going swimmingly with 
his "nuces" under my mother's instructions. One by one 
they all finished their tasks, and there was I left with a 
chorus in the "Medea" which I could not translate at 
all, getting more muddled and hopeless every minute, 
and making fresh mistakes as we went over it again, and 
my father getting exasperated with my stupidity. Stupid 
I was, but my chief ailment that morning was that I was 
frightened and addled and dazed with his displeasure. 
Right up till lunch time was I kept at my task that day, 



186 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

and in the afternoon there was a walk in the rain, and I 
got into some further disgrace for hitting Hugh with my 
umbrella in mere retaliation. I was "done to a turn" by 
this time, and I think my mother must have pointed that 
out, for next morning, anyhow, instead of that just and 
terrible thunder-cloud, when I brought up the weary 
chorus again for retranslation, my father was enchant- 
ingly encouraging, and slipped in little corrections when 
I made mistakes, as if I had corrected myself. There was 
no allusion to yesterday's trouble, and under his approval 
my wits rallied themselves, and at the end he shut up the 
book with a delicious smile and told me that it was the 
best lesson I had ever brought him. . . . 



CHAPTER VII 



THE WIDENING HORIZONS 



MY father took me in person to Marlborough. I did 
not much relish that, since I thought, with private 
school ideas still hanging about me, that it would be a 
handicap to be known as the son of a man who wore black 
cloth gaiters, an apron, and a hat with strings at the side. 
That was all very well in Cornwall, where he was bishop, 
but here I should have preferred a parent who looked like 
other parents. He seemed to have no consciousness of 
being unusually dressed himself, and one incident in the 
few hours he stayed much impressed itself on me, for he 
came with me into some class-room or other where a lot 
of boys were sitting, talking and whistling, with their 
caps on. My father took off his hat when he entered 
(which again I thought showed a slight want of knowl- 
edge), and then, to my surprise, every boy in the place 
did the same. The whistling ceased, nobody laughed, 
and I went out again rather proud of him. He seemed to 
have done the right thing. . . . 

Outside the College buildings there were two or 
three small boarding-houses and three large ones contain- 
ing forty to fifty boys each, into one of which I should 
have gone if I had got the famous "House Scholarship." 
As it was, I was put into B House, a square brick build- 
ing of three stories, each of which constituted an in- 
college house. The edifice itself was like a penitentiary : 

137 



138 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

a big open space from the skylight to the basement occu- 
pied the centre of it, with two class-rooms and a boot- 
room in the basement. Round this open space ran three 
floors of stone passages, connected by stone stairs; these 
passages were lit by arches opening on to the central space, 
and defended from it by tall iron bars; and out of these 
three tiers of passages opened four dormitories on each 
floor, a class-room, one bathroom with three baths, a 
sitting and bedroom belonging to the house-master of each 
house, with corresponding accommodation for a second 
house-master at the opposite corner, and a study next to 
the bathroom for the head of the house. Ten to fifteen 
boys slept in each of these dormitories, which were lit by 
day from three or four small windows, and for purposes 
of going to bed and getting up in the dark from one small 
gas-jet. Down the centre of each dormitory stood a 
board punctuated with basins, one for each boy, and fur- 
nished with a corresponding number of crockery mugs to 
hold water for tooth- washing. A narrow shelf ran round 
the room above the beds, where brushes and combs were 
kept. There was a chest of drawers underneath the gas- 
jet belonging to the prefect of the dormitory, and he had 
a chair by his bedside where he could put his clothes. As 
half the beds were directly below the windows, the oc- 
cupants naturally objected to having their immediate 
windows open during inclemencies, so on cold or rainy 
nights they were all shut. There were no partitions be- 
tween the beds; all operations were conducted in whole- 
some publicity, and there was no objection to anybody 
saying his prayers. Each dormitory was known by a 
letter of the alphabet; the houses were called B 1, B 2, 
B 3, and every boy had his school number. Thus my dry 
description was Benson, E. F., 234, B 1, L. 



THE WIDENING HORIZONS 189 

The day was a strenuous one. A clanging bell per- 
ambulating the passages murdered sleep at half-past six, 
and there was chapel at seven. If you chose to get up 
at half-past six, you had time for a cup of water-cocoa on 
the ground floor and for a bath. Usually you got up on 
the first sound of chapel-bell at 6 150, and, cocoa-less and 
with bootlaces flying, sped down the stairs and across the 
court to get within the gates outside chapel before a single 
fateful stroke of the bell announced that you were late. 
By the gate were stationed two masters who on the stroke 
put their arms across the entrance and prevented further 
ingress. If there were many boys outside at that critical 
moment they used to charge the masters and get in some- 
how, bearing down all opposition, and it was delightful 
on such occasions to be safely and legitimately inside and 
see a sort of football scrimmage going on. Usually, how- 
ever, there would only be a few stragglers, who attempted 
no violence. Punishments for being late varied : on the 
first occasion there was no penalty, but if you persevered 
in tardiness, the penalties became unpleasantly heavy. 
But if you were late, you could at least do up your boot- 
laces and get a cup of cocoa. 

There was a lesson from about a quarter-past seven on 
the conclusion of chapel till a quarter-past eight. A 
wholly insufficient breakfast was then provided, consist- 
ing of tea ready mixed out of a tin can, a circular inch 
of butter, and bread ; on certain mornings there was por- 
ridge. If you wanted anything beyond this fare, you had 
to buy it yourself at school-shop. But you took your pri- 
vate milk-jug in to breakfast and were given, I suppose, 
about a quarter of a pint of milk, which you kept for a 
purpose. During the morning there were two hours' 
school and one hour's preparation and an hour and a half 



140 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

leisure. There was meat and pudding for dinner at half- 
past one, and thereafter the total provender provided was 
another inch of butter, with tea and bread, at six, and 
supper consisting of hard biscuits, a piece of cheese, and a 
glass of beer after evening chapel, about 8.45. I had 
an allowance, originally, of sixpence a week, which was 
soon increased to a shilling; and, quite rightly, the whole 
of that used to be spent in getting things to eat. These 
were consumed at that daily love-feast called "brewing," 
which was a joyful affair and merits its own paragraph. 

"Brewing" was a social function; you brewed in your 
class-room with your friend, for everybody had a friend 
of some kind, and nobody brewed alone. This function 
took place at varying hours in the afternoon, as dictated 
by the hours of school, and rendered unnecessary the 
scanty affair called "tea" provided by the college com- 
missariat. In fact, as a rule, nobody went into college tea 
at all, so bloated was he with liquid when poor, and 
with liquid mixed with cake when rich. Brewing had 
never anything to do with beer, for in winter you brewed 
tea or coffee, and in summer lemonade in large earthen- 
ware bowls, with straws or india-rubber pipes to drink it 
from. The tea itself you certainly brought from home 
(and when that was used up Beth would send me some 
more), sometimes you had sugar, and sometimes you 
hadn't, and the milk was provided, as aforesaid, by the 
college commissariat, and thus the whole of your money 
could be devoted to cake. And there we sat each fellow 
by his friend, when football was over, with kettles in- 
terminably filled at the college pump, and put to boil on 
public gas-stoves, jealously watched in turn by you or 
your friend, and the fresh kettle-full of water was poured 
on the tea-leaves, and the last crumb of cake was de- 



THE WIDENING HORIZONS 141 

voured, and the last drop of milk was coaxed out of the 
jug, and you enjoyed the full fellowship of not quite 
enough to eat, scrupulously divided, and the romance of 
being fourteen or fifteen thickened and fructified. You 
quarrelled and made it up, and indeed there was very 
little quarrelling, and you looked round the class-room, 
and intrigued and wondered and loved, and spliced a 
broken squash-racket, and uncurled the interminable folds 
of felt of a burst fives-ball, down to the heart of cork 
that lay in the centre of it, and made fresh plans. Then 
if you were very prudent you washed out the teapot and 
the cups and saucers, and especially the milk-jug, because 
if you didn't, it stank appallingly next morning, and in 
the morning you could not get any hot water. Cold water 
was of no use with a milk-jug: it had to be rinsed with hot 
water, unless you wanted to find dreadful curds when, 
next day, the fresh milk was poured into it. Bloated 
with tea you went to chapel again, and didn't want any 
beer or cheese, and wished it was brewing-time again. 
Then there was an hour's preparation in the house class- 
room, and if you had not had a bath in the morning 
very likely you had one at night, and the other boys 
drifted into your dormitory where already you lay warm 
and sleepy in bed, and perhaps the head of the house gave 
you a piece of hot buttered toast, as he came in, for pre- 
fects had the privilege of taking bread and butter away 
from hall, and you ate it sumptuously and wiped your 
greasy hands on the bedclothes. If there was a boy with 
the gift of narrative in the dormitory, he often told a 
story as soon as lights were put out (or rather the one 
gas-jet) until he or his hearers got sleepy, and the story 
faded into silence. A slippered footstep would be heard 



142 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

along the passage, and the house-master, candle in hand, 
made his round of the dormitories. . . . 

In each dormitory there was a big boy, not in sixth 
form, who was captain of the dormitory, and a prefect 
in sixth form. On the character of these and the two or 
three other big fellows depended the character of their 
dormitory. Bullying, as far as I know, was non-existent; 
but in all other respects, they had far more power for 
good or ill in their hands than the whole staff of masters 
put together, for the house-master went his rounds soon 
after lights were put out, and it was pretty certain that 
he would not intrude again. Even if he should take it 
into his head to come out of his rooms a second time, his 
approach could be signalled by the boy who occupied the 
bed opposite the door, which was always left open; he 
would be told to Cf keep cave," and stories or bolster- 
fights or any other irregularity could safely be committed, 
for the young Brangaene from the watch-tower of a bed 
would whisper, "cave," and the white-robed had plenty 
of time to steal back to their nests from wherever they 
might be and be plunged in profound sleep before the 
master traversed the passage. Practically, then, there 
was no superior supervision; the elder boys and prefects 
of dormitories moulded the material committed to their 
charge as they chose, and certainly there was no secret 
detective-work or encouragement of talebearers on the 
part of the masters. The decency, the morality, the dis- 
cipline that result from such a system, where these virtues 
are the result of public opinion, are of far more robust 
quality than if they are merely the forced product of the 
fear of detection. With the hideous ingenuity that is 
peculiarly characteristic of boys, it would have been 
perfectly easy to have evaded detection, if the knowledge 



THE WIDENING HORIZONS 143 

that there was secret detective-work going on on the part 
of masters had challenged our wits and roused us to in- 
vention for the sake alone of "scoring off" masters. As 
it was, a well-behaved dormitory behaved well because 
it was "bad form" to behave otherwise, while a dormitory 
naturally ill-behaved, would have invented some system 
of sentries which would certainly have defeated all sur- 
prise night-attacks on the part of masters, and not, as 
Plato says, have "advanced one whit in virtue." Boys 
are far more ingenious than grown-up men, and the chal- 
lenge on the part of the authorities implied by creeping 
about at strange hours of the night in slippers would cer- 
tainly have been delightedly accepted. But there was 
no such challenge and well-conducted dormitories, by far 
the majority, grew, so to speak, on their own root, and 
were not grafted on to any stem that fed them with the 
sap of authority. 

Meantime, the fatal foundation-scholarship examina- 
tion, to be held in December, was approaching, and I 
awaited its advent with an unruffled consciousness of 
another failure imminent. -To prepare for it, I had 
certain private tuition out of school hours, and by a much 
more oppressive piece of legislation, I was not allowed to 
have anything to do with music except in so far as it was 
musical to contribute a muscular treble to the choir in 
chapel. That deprivation I still deplore, for I had at that 
time an odd and quite untrained faculty for visualizing, 
by some interior process, tunes that I heard, and being 
able to "see" them, so to speak, without any direct exer- 
cise of will. Thus, a term or two later, when an ac- 
companist failed, I took his place at some sing-song, and 
transposed at sight Handel's "Where'er you walk," 
which I did not previously know, from the key of B 



144 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

flat into G, without any sense of effort, thanks to this little 
"kink" of internal visualization. Whatever that kink 
was, it was not the result of training, but, I suppose, some 
small natural aptitude towards the science of sound which 
now I dearly wish that I had been allowed to water and 
cultivate without break. It must have been a feeble and 
under-vitalized growth, for when I was at liberty again 
to waste as much time as I chose at the piano, it was 
certainly less vigorous than it had been, and never after- 
wards recovered, when I could stray and strum as I 
pleased in melodious pastures. The soil in which it 
grew was there, for all my life music has been to me as 
a celestial light, shining in dark places for the mitigation 
of their blackness, and flooding the serene and sunlit 
with its especial gold, but from that soil there withered a 
little herb that once grew there, a nest with incubated 
eggs was despoiled, and the bird came not back. But I 
expect that the wisdom of the edict was fully justified in 
the judgment of the prohibitionists, when on one snowy 
morning in December the list of the winners of founda- 
tion-scholarships was promulgated, and there was my 
name incredibly among them at a decent altitude. • 

By one of Nature's most admirable devices our memo- 
ries always retain a keener sense of such experiences as 
have been enjoyable, than those of the drabber sort, and 
to-day I find nothing that I can pick out of the bran-pie 
that was not bright and alluring. There were friend- 
ships and hero-worships, the initiation, in a blue and 
black striped jersey, into the muddy mysteries of Rugby 
football, and the dizzy heights (soaring far above the 
sordid business of the foundation-scholarship) of playing 
in the lower team of the house. There was a school con- 
cert at the end of that first term, and it gave me a com- 



THE WIDENING HORIZONS 145 

placent thrill to remember that I was a foundation- 
scholar when the "Carmen" was sung. But it gave me a 
sense of stupefied astonishment to hear the organist, Mr. 
Bambridge, play as an encore to his piano-solo, his own 
original variations on the theme of "Auld Lang Syne." 
Never (except in the case of Miss Wirtz) was there such 
a finger, and speaking purely from the impression then 
made, I should be obliged to confess that for matter of 
pure brilliance of execution and mastery of technique, 
Mr. Bambridge must have been a far more accomplished 
performer than any pianist whom I have heard since. 
Why did he not take London by storm with those amaz- 
ing pyrotechnics of his own invention, and throne himself 
higher than ever Paderewski or Carreno or Busoni soared % 
I cannot even now bring myself to believe that any of 
those lesser lights ever shone like Mr. Bambridge, when 
with flying fingers and any quantity of the loud pedal he 
swooped up and down in pearly runs and tremendous 
octaves, while all the time that powerful thumb of his, 
relentless and regular as the stroke of a piston, beat out 
simultaneously (there was the wonder of it) the original 
air. I wanted the piano to comprise an extra octave or 
two that so he might have a larger arena for his melodious 
magic. I wanted to have more ears, so that they should all 
be glutted with the beautiful banging and netted in the 
gossamer of Mr. Bambridge's chromatic scales. Even 
Bach — but it is always idle to make comparisons between 
the supreme: who judges between the various peaks that 
face the dawn, or cares to plumb the sea, so long as the 
sun glitters on its surface, and in the shadow of the rock 
there glows the translucent blue of Tyre? . . . 

Straight from that concert I made my honourable re- 
turn to Truro, and found that my spurs were won, and 



146 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

with a light heart played Pirates again, and under the 
short reign of Byron's supremacy ( for we had been learn- 
ing "Childe Harold" by heart in the English repetition 
lesson) deluged the chaste pages of the Saturday Mag- 
azine with amorous innocence. Soon, too, the butterfly 
collection began to assume the virile toga, for though 
music was forbidden as a study, natural history, as en- 
couraged at Marlborough by the society known as the 
"Bug and Beetle," was a legitimate pursuit, and my father 
strongly approved of my entering for the "Staunton 
Prize," awarded to the best collection of butterflies and 
moths, to be made that spring and summer, and to be 
adjudged in the autumn. In the warm early-maturing 
spring of Cornwall, the downs and lanes were lively with 
lepidoptera at Easter, and those second holidays, passing 
in a whirl of butterfly nets and a corking and uncorking 
of killing-bottles, were a sort of canonization of the col- 
lections. Brimstones and garden whites, and holly blues 
and small tortoiseshells took on a more serious aspect, 
and the pins that eventually fixed them in cork-lined 
boxes were indeed as nails driven in by masters of as- 
semblies. The collection must be a strictly personal one : 
I had to catch the victims myself, and kill and set them, 
but Maggie, even more wildly enthusiastic than me, 
might, without a violation of conscientious scruples, in- 
dicate a yellow- tip enjoying the sunshine, or among nib- 
bled leaves discover a geometer caterpillar turning itself 
into a measuring-rod. 

Cricket, therefore, on the return for the summer half 
took a subordinate place, and obtaining "leave off" from 
it as a compulsory game, I spent the long summer after- 
noons in the enchantment of Savernake Forest. Here it 
was that the Staunton Collection began to lay more preg- 



THE WIDENING HORIZONS 147 

nant eggs in a receptive soil, for I trace to those sunny 
hours the betrothal of my soul to the goddess of trees 
and solitary places, to whose allegiance I have ever been 
faithful. Net in hand, and bulging with nests of chip- 
boxes I used to climb the steep down fringed with the 
secular beeches that form the outer wall of that superb 
woodland, pausing perhaps for a "blue" or a "small 
copper" on the way, but eager for entry into the temple 
of trees. Here underneath those living towers, the earth 
would be bare, but from the coverts where the sunlight 
fell only in flakes and shower-drops of gold, you passed 
into open glades of bracken and bramble, through which 
ran smooth grass-walks of short downland turf. In these 
sunny lakes of forest-enfolded open, a few hawthorns 
stood like snowy and sweet-smelling islands, and along 
the edges of the grass-rides hovered the speckled fritilla- 
ries. Then came a group of hazel trees to be beaten, with 
net spread beneath to catch the dropping caterpillars, and 
grey-trunked oaks, whose bark was to be diligently 
searched for slumbering dagger-moths, difficult to find 
owing to their protective colouring. Red-spotted burnets 
clung to thistle-heads, green hair-streaks (especially in 
Rabley Copse) must be put up from their resting-places 
before they were visible, and there too marble whites 
rustled their chequered wings in my net. Deeper and 
deeper into the forest would I go, and though I had every 
conscious faculty alert for pursuits and captures, yet all 
the time — and this is precisely why I have lingered with 
such prolixity over the Staunton Prize — the honey-bees 
of my subconscious self were swarming in with their im- 
perishable gleanings. Cell after cell they constructed 
within me, and filled them with the essences that they 
culled from beech and fern and all the presences that 



148 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

subtly haunted the great forest aisles. There first did I 
hear the music of Pan's flute with the inward ear, and 
with the inward eye did I see the dancing satyrs, and 
the dryads of the woods; and if, as most surely I believe, 
my disembodied spirit shall some day visit the places 
where I learned to love the beauty of this peerless world, 
how swiftly will it traverse the thyme-tufted downs of 
Wiltshire to breathe again the noble and august serenity 
of the forest, and see the fritillaries poise on the bracken 
at the edge of the grass-rides. 

The Staunton Prize (with how much more derived 
from those excursions!) fluttered pleasantly into my 
butterfly net, and with the flaming of the autumn leaves, 
and the hibernation of my quarry, another interest, that 
of athleticism, asserted its supremacy over its eager sub- 
ject. Much has been written by many wise men as to 
this robust autocracy in schools, deploring its paramount 
sway, and suggesting nobler ideals than muscular swift- 
ness and accuracy of eye for youth's pursuing, but what, 
when all is said and done, can be proposed as a substi- 
tute while the nature of the average boy remains what 
it is ? Love of learning, intellectual ambitions at that age 
are natural but to the few, and while we all respect the 
youth who at the age of fifteen is really more attracted by 
history or philosophy than by fives and football, who can 
believe that there would be any great gain to the nation 
at large if every schoolboy was like him 1 ? It is frankly 
unthinkable that the average boy should choose as his 
heroes those members of the sixth form who have a tre* 
mendous aptitude for Iambics, or applaud, with the 
fanatic enthusiasm with which he hails a fine run down 
the football field, the intellectual athlete who this morn- 
ing showed up so stunning a piece of Ciceronian prose. 



THE WIDENING HORIZONS 149 

Full opportunity in school hours and in voluntary study is 
given to the few who, from physical disability or mental 
precocity, actually prefer intellectual pursuits to athletics, 
but the English fifteen-year-old is naturally a Philistine, 
and Philistia had much better be glad of him. For as 
a rule he is not a prig, and while he cannot quite under- 
stand how anyone should prefer reading to playing games, 
he does not despise the student, but generally refers to 
him with a certain vague respect as being "jolly clever." 
But if it was possible to implant firmly in the soil of 
schools the intellectual banner, and to succeed in making 
the whole body of boys rally enthusiastically round it, it 
is difficult to repress a shudder at the thought of what 
that school would be like. Germany, perhaps, alone 
among the modern nations has succeeded in imbuing its 
youth with a passion for learning and discipline, and it 
would appear, now that we have been able to appreciate 
German mentality, that this triumphant achievement 
has been won at an appalling cost ; at the cost, that is, of 
precisely those virtues which games, generally speaking, 
are productive of. And in the long run, and on the large 
scale that type seems to come to a bad maturity. 

It is right then that for small boys games no less 
than work should be compulsory, for if work produces 
the man of letters, the man of science, the artist, the edu- 
cated individual who can take his place in a progressive 
nation, not less do games produce a certain general hardi- 
hood, a sense of fair play, lacking which we should fare 
badly as a nation. To most boys with growing limbs 
and swelling sinews, physical activity is a natural in- 
stinct, and there is no need to drive them into the foot- 
ball field or the fives court: they go there because they 
like it, and there is no need to make games compulsory 



150 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

for them. But it is for those who, whether from a lazy 
habit of body or from a precociously active habit of mind, 
do not naturally gravitate to those pleasant arenas, that 
this compulsion is necessary, and to make them, for the 
sake of their health, go for a walk instead, does not 
produce at all the desired effect. They can go for any 
number of pleasant walks when they are fifty : at fifteen 
(given they have not got some corporal disability) it is 
far better for them to run and to kick and to hit and to 
sweat. Not their bodies alone partake in these benefits : 
their minds learn control of all kinds; they must keep 
their tempers, they must remain cool in hot corners (such 
as they will assuredly experience in their offices in later 
life), they must maintain a certain suavity in the midst 
of violence; and it is just this discipline here roughly 
summed up that gives games their value. Presently, 
when the studious are a year or two older, they will have 
attained to scholastic altitudes where athletic compulsion 
is no longer put upon them, and then they can please 
themselves. By that time, too, the normal young Philis- 
tine will have awoke to the importance of other things 
than games, and, unless he is a sheer impenetrable 
dunce, have come to regard the studious with far more 
sincere respect. But for both, this year or two of com- 
pulsion is wholly beneficial. As for the supposed inflex- 
ibility of this athletic autocracy, it is founded on a com- 
plete misapprehension: it should with far more accuracy 
be described as a democracy, for its heroes and legisla- 
tors are undoubtedly elected by the people, and until the 
nature of boys is subjected to some radical operation, so 
long will they continue (though with infinite indulgence 
for the "jolly clever") to make heroes after their own 
hearts. 



THE WIDENING HORIZONS 151 

That which above all gilded and glorified these de- 
lights, that which was the stem from which their green 
leaves drew nourishment, was friendship. All these were 
the foliage that was fed from that stem, though the sun 
and the clear windy air and the rain fortified and re- 
freshed them and swelled the buds that expanded into 
flowers. For what man is there, surrounded though he 
be with the love of wife and children, who does not re- 
tain a memory of the romantic affection of boys for each 
other 1 ? Having felt it, he could scarcely have forgotten 
it, and if he never felt it he missed one of the most 
golden of the prizes of youth, . unrecapturable in mature 
life. In many ways boys are a sex quite apart from male 
or female: though they take on much of what they are 
and of what they learn, strengthened and expanded, into 
manhood, they leave behind, given that they grow into 
normal and healthy beings, a certain emotional affection 
towards the coevals of their own sex which is natural to 
public-school boyhood, even as it is, though perhaps less 
robustly, to girlhood. For twelve or thirteen weeks three 
times a year they live exclusively among boys, and that 
at a time when their vigour is at its strongest, and it 
would demand of them a fish-like inhumanity, if they 
were asked to let their friendships alone have no share 
of the tremendous high colours in which their lives are 
dipped. Naturally there is danger about it (for what 
emotion worth having is not encompassed by perils'?) 
and this strong beat of affection may easily explode into 
fragments of mere sensuality, be dissipated in mere 
"smut" and from being a banner in the clean wind be 
trampled into mud. But promiscuous immorality was, as 
far as I am aware, quite foreign to the school, though 
we flamed into a hundred hot bonfires of these friend- 



152 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

ships, which were discussed with a freedom that would 
seem appalling, if you forgot that you were dealing with 
boys and not with men. Blaze after blaze illumined our 
excited lives, for without being one whit less genuine 
while they lasted, there was no very permanent quality 
about these friendships. Your friend or you might get 
swept into another orbit; diversity of tastes, promotion 
in school, conflicting interests might sever you, and in 
all friendliness you passed on, with eyes eager to give or 
to receive some new shy signal which heralded the ap- 
proach of another of these genial passions. For me 
the sentimentality that coloured the choir-boy affair, or 
that not less misbegotten case of Mrs. Carter had quite 
faded from my emotional palette, which now was spread 
with hues far more robust and healthy. My signals were 
all made for the strong and the masculine, and I quite 
put out my lights and showed a stony blackness to flut- 
terings from one of mincing walk or elegant gestures or 
a conjectured softness of disposition. I loved the children 
of the sun, and the friends of rain and wind, who were 
swift in the three-quarter line, and played squash with 
me in the snow ; but still, by some strange law of attrac- 
tion, too regular for coincidence, they were most of them 
musical, and once more, though now without sentimental- 
it)', chapel services, as in the case of the choir-boy and 
Lincoln Cathedral, were entwined with my volatile but 
violent affections. One such friend sang tenor and I 
intrigued my corn-crake way back into the choir in order 
to sit next him: another led the trebles. He must have 
been quite two years younger than myself, which is a 
gulf wider than two decades in mature life. But we 
bridged it with a structure that carried us safely to each 
other; there was music in that bridge, and there was the 



THE WIDENING HORIZONS 153 

wonder in young eyes of the fact that you had found (and 
so had he) a passionate pilgrim, voyaging through fives- 
courts and glades of Savernake, because of whom those 
external phenomena shone with a new brightness, so 
that now the sweep of the forest, and the fives-courts, and 
the mire in the football fields, and the inadequate bound- 
ing of balls in an open squash court, owing to the snow 
that lay soddenly melting, grew into scenes and settings 
for the jewels of human companionships and boyish af- 
fections. 

Intellectual kinship, community of tastes had very 
little part in those friendships : they were founded on a 
subtle instinct, and they were born of a blind mutual 
choice. Often your tentative scouting was quite still- 
born: you would hope for a friendship, and perhaps he 
would have no signals for you, but wait wide-eyed and 
expectant, for somebody quite different. Or again you 
could have a "culte" (to adopt an odious phraseology for 
which, in English, there happens to be no equivalent) 
for someone, who in the sundered worlds of modern and 
classic schools, might be miles away, and then with a 
sudden and wondrous reward, the idol would give some 
such signal of glance (that would be a direct method) or 
more indirectly, he would say something to his compan- 
ion as he happened to pass you in the court, which you 
knew was really meant for you, and on your next meet- 
ing you would perhaps get a glance, which was at least 
an enquiry as to whether you were disposed towards 
friendship. And then as you waited in the clear dusk 
of some summer evening for the sounding of the boring 
chapel-bell, you would sit down on one of the seats round 
the lime-trees in the court outside, and he would stroll by, 
still linked by an arm to some other friend, and you 



154 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

rather dolefully wondered whether, after all, there was 
to be anything doing. The two would be lost in the 
crowd beginning to collect round the chapel gate, and then 
perhaps the figure for which you were watching would 
detach itself, alone now, from the others, and with an 
elaborate unconsciousness of your presence he would 
stroll to the seat where you waited, and with the impla- 
cable shyness that always ushered in these affairs still 
take no notice of you. As he sat down it may be that a 
book dropped from under his arm, and you picked it up 
for him, and he said, "Oh thanks! Hullo, is that you'?" 
knowing perfectly well that it was, and you would say, 
"Hullo!" ... So after each had said, "Hullo," one 
said, "There's about three minutes yet before stroke, isn't 
there 1 ?" and the other replied, "About that," and then 
taking the plunge said : 

"I say, I've got a squash court to-morrow at twelve. 
Will you have a game?' and the answer, if things were 
going well would be, "O ripping; thanks awfully!" 

Then a precious minute would go by in silence and it 
was time to get up and go into chapel, with a new joy of 
life swimming into your ken. Never did Cortez stare at 
the Pacific with a wilder surmise than that with which he 
and you looked at each other as together you passed out of 
the dusk into the brightly lit ante-chapel, thinking of that 
game of squash to-morrow, which perhaps was to lay the 
foundation-stone of the temple of a new friendship. There 
would be time enough after that for a dip at the bathing- 
place, and a breathless race not to be late for hall. . . . 

The ardent affair, if the squash and the bath had 
been satisfactory, blazed after that like a prairie fire, and 
the two became inseparable for a term, or if not that for 
a few weeks. But to suppose that this ardency was 



THE WIDENING HORIZONS 155 

sensual is to miss the point of it and lose the value of it 
altogether. That the base of the attraction was largely 
physical is no doubt true, for it was founded primarily 
on appearance, but there is a vast difference between the 
breezy open-air quality of these friendships and the dingy 
sensualism which sometimes is wrongly attributed to 
them. A grown-up man cannot conceivably recapture 
their quality, so as to experience it emotionally, but to 
confuse it with moral perversion, as the adult understand 
that, is merely to misunderstand it. 

For a year I sat solid and unmovable in the form in 
which I had been placed when I came to Marlborough, 
and was then hoisted into the lower fifth, and began a 
rather swifter climbing of the scholastic ladder, because I 
came for the first time under a master who woke in me 
an intellectual interest in Greek and Latin. This was 
A. H. Beesly, who was by far the most gifted teacher I 
ever came under either at school or at the University. 
Not for me alone but for his whole form he made waters 
break out in the wilderness, and irrigated the sad story 
of Hecuba with the springs of human emotion. He had 
translated it himself into English blank verse, with a pro- 
logue that told how some Athenian slave, carried off to 
Rome to serve in the household, read to fellow-captives 
this song of Zion in his captivity. What the intrinsic 
merits of the translation were, I can form no idea, but of 
the effect of it on his^form, as read by the author, I cherish 
the liveliest memory. For three or four Hecuba lessons 
we would get no reading, and then Beesly would turn 
round to the fire when we had stumbled through another 
thirty lines, and say, "Well now, you boys don't know 
what a fine thing it is. Let's see what we can make of 



156 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

your last few lessons. I'll read you a translation : follow 
it in your Greek. We'll begin at line 130." Then he 
would read this sumptuous jewelled paraphrase, which 
rendered in English blank verse the sense of the passages 
we had droned and plodded through, and gave them the 
dramatic significance which we all had missed when we 
took the original in compulsory doses of Greek. For a 
long time we never knew who was the author of this 
English version, and then one day Beesly brought into 
form a whole bale of copies, printed in sheets, unfolded 
and uncut, and gave one to each of us. There was the 
name on the title page, as translated by A. H. B., with 
the heading, "The Trojan Queen's Revenge." Never in 
bookshop or in second-hand bookstall have I seen a copy 
of that work, and I rejoice in that for perhaps I might be 
disillusioned as to its merits, if I had seen it subsequently. 
Certainly "The Trojan Queen's Revenge" was printed, 
but I suspect (and bury the suspicion) that it fell still- 
born from the press, and that the author bought up the 
unbound copies. As it is, it has for me the significance of 
some equerry who introduced me to the presence of royal 
Greece, making the Greeks from that day forth the 
supreme interpreters of humanity. Under the influence 
of "The Trojan Queen's Revenge" I passed through the 
portals into the very throne-room of that House of Art, 
so that to this day I must secretly always employ a cer- 
tain Greek standard to whatever the world holds of 
beauty. Greek gems, Greek statues, became for me the 
gold standard, compared to which all else, though noble, 
must be of baser stuff. There were to be many idle terms 
yet before I cared one atom about the Greek language 
intrinsically : as far as the literature went I only cared for 
the spirit of it revealed in "The Trojan Queen's Re- 



THE WIDENING HORIZONS 157 

venge." And before I quitted that form we had pieces 
of (Edipus Coloneus brought to our notice, and once again 
Beesly read out some translation — I suppose of his own 
— of the great chorus. 

"But if you want the spirit of it," he said, "listen to 
this. It's by a man called Swinburne, of whom you have 
probably never heard. Shut your books." 

I can see him now: it was a chilly day in spring and 
he put his feet up on the side of the stove that warmed 
the classroom. He had closed his book too, and his blue 
merry eyes grew grave as he began : 

"When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, 
The mother of months in meadow and plain 
Fills the hollows and windy place 
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain, 
And the bright brown nightingale, amorous, 
Is half assuaged for Itylum, 
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces, 
The tongueless vigil and all the pain." 

Beesly held the thirty boys under the spell of that 
magic: we were all quite ordinary youngsters of fifteen 
and sixteen, and lo, we were a harp in his hand and he 
thrummed us into melody. There was stir and trampling 
of feet outside, for the hour of school was over, and I 
remember well that he waited at the end of one stanza, 
and said, "Shall I finish it or would you like to go*? Any 
boy who likes may go." 

Nobody got up (it was not from fear of his disap- 
proval), and he went on: 

"For winter's rains and ruins are over, 
And all the season of snows and sins, 
The day that severs lover from lover, 



158 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

The light that loses, the night that wins. 
And Time remembered is grief forgotten, 
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, 
And in green underwood and cover 
Blossom by blossom the spring begins." 

He came to the end of the chorus and got up. 

"You can all be ten minutes late next school," he said, 
"because I have kept you." 

Just as I must always think of "The Trojan Queen's 
Revenge" as being among the masterpieces of blank 
verse in the English language, so I cannot believe that 
Beesly was not the finest racket-player who has ever served 
that fascinating little hard ball into the side-nick of the 
back-hand court. There was a new racket court just 
built in the corner of the cricket-field, and here at twelve 
o'clock on three mornings of the week, Beesly and another 
master played the two boys who would represent the 
school in the Public Schools racket competition at Easter. 
The court, anonymously presented to the school, was an- 
nounced, when Beesly retired a few years later, to be his 
gift, and he provided practically all the balls used in these 
games. Hour after hour I used to watch these matches 
and began to play myself with the juniors. Beesly often 
looked on from the gallery, in order to detect new talent, 
and on one imperishable day, as we came out of the court 
he said to me, "You've got some notion of the game: 
mind you stick to it." If I had wanted any encourage- 
ment that would have determined me, and I began to 
think rackets and dream rackets and visualize nick-services 
and half-volley returns just above the line. Beesly kept 
a quiet eye on me, and after I had left his form, he would 
often ask me to walk up towards his house with him, if 
I was going that way, and would ask me to breakfast on 



THE WIDENING HORIZONS 159 

Sunday mornings, and what feasts of the gods were these ! 
Perhaps there would be one of the school representatives 
there, and Beesly, when the sausages and the kidneys 
were done, would show us the racket cups he had won, or 
he would read us something or tend the flowers in his 
greenhouse. All this sounds trivial, but he never pro- 
duced a trivial effect, and gradually he established over 
me a complete hold, morally and mentally, which was 
as far as I can judge entirely healthy and stimulating. If 
he had seen me often with someone whom he considered 
an undesirable companion he would fidget and grunt a 
little and pull his long whiskers, and then with a glance 
merry and shy and wholly disarming he said, "Now there 
are plenty of people it's good to see a little of, but not too 
much of." He would mention no name, but he never 
failed to convey the sense of his allusion. On the other 
hand if he thought I was devoting myself too much to 
games (and in especial rackets) he would say, "Nothing 
makes you enjoy a game of rackets so much as having 
done a couple of hours hard work first." Or if, having 
watched me playing, he thought I wasn't taking the game 
seriously enough, he would stroll away with me from the 
court, and a propos of nothing at all, he would casually 
remark, "Better do nothing than do a thing slackly. 
You'll find your games fall off, unless you play as hard 
as you can." . . . And then up at his house on one 
ecstatic morning when I was getting on for seventeen he 
suddenly said, "You'll be playing for the school next 
year if you take pains." Next moment he had a volume 
of Browning in his hand and said, "Browning now : ever 
read any Browning? I thought not. Listen to me for 
a couple of minutes," and he read "The Lost Leader." 
Once, I remember, I had been to his house in the evening, 



160 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

and he walked back with me across the cricket-field after 
night had fallen. The sky was clear and a myriad frosty 
stars burned there. For some little way Beesly walked 
in silence, then, in his low distinct voice he began: 

"See how the floor of heaven 
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold." 

I insist on the apparent triviality and fragmentariness 
of all this, for it was just in these ways, not in heavy 
discourses or lectures on morality and studiousness and 
activity, that Beesly gained his ascendency over me. He 
was never a great talker, but these obiter dicta stamped 
themselves on my mind like some stroke of a steel die 
on malleable metal. He was never in the smallest degree 
demonstrative: he might have been speaking to a blank 
wall, except just for that glance, merry and intimate, 
which he occasionally showed me, but for all that I 
divined a strong affection, which I for my part returned 
in a glow of hero-worship. The very fact that he never 
asked for a confidence prompted me to tell him all that 
perplexed or interested me, in the sure knowledge that he 
would always throw light in some brief curt sentence. 
"Stupid thing to do," was one of his wise comments when 
I had told him of some row I had got into with my house 
master. "Go and apologize, and then don't think any- 
thing more about it." There was the root and kernel 
of the matter : down came that steel die, sharply impress- 
ing itself, whereas discursive and laboured advice would 
have merely been boring and unconvincing. Off I went, 
trusting implicitly in his wisdom, and finding it wholly 
justified. 

And then, alas and alas, I wholly and utterly disap- 



THE WIDENING HORIZONS 161 

pointed Beesly. I had, as he prophesied, attained to the 
dignity of playing for the school at rackets, and had yet 
another year before I left, and he made up his mind that 
I and my partner were going to win the challenge cup 
for Marlborough, where it had never yet been brought 
home. Certainly two terms before that final event we 
were an extremely promising pair, but after that we 
scarcely improved at all, and fell from one stagnation of 
staleness into another. Beesly took the wrong line about 
this, and in the Christmas holidays that year I went to 
stay with him at Torquay, in order to get more practice, 
whereas what I needed was less practice. Even then we 
made a close match in the semi-final or thereabouts with 
the pair who eventually won, and Beesly, who up till 
the last day, when he urged me to take a heroic dose of 
Hunyadi water, continued to cling to the idea that at 
last Marlborough would win, had all his hopes dashed 
to atoms. Well do I remember his waiting for me out- 
side the court, when we came out ; he could hardly speak, 
but he patted me on the shoulder and blurted out, "Well, 
I know you did your best: I know that," and walked 
quickly away. He wrote me that night the most charming 
letter, trying to console me who really cared far less 
than he did ; for it was, I am perfectly convinced, the main 
ambition of his life that Marlborough should win this 
cup, and for a whole year he had believed that now at' 
last we were going to, and that I was the chief of the 
instruments through whom that ambition was to be 
realized. 

He combined his two passions for rackets and poetry, 
in some such way as Pindar, who wrote the most mag- 
nificent odes the world has ever read in honour of boys 
who won victories at Olympia, and it was this Pindaric 



162 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

affection which he felt for those on whom his hopes 
centred at Queen's. The affection I certainly returned, 
but woe for the manner in which I failed to fulfil the rest 
of the contract. 

I suspect he was an unhappy man, and he was certainly 
a very lonely one, and his loneliness no doubt was ac- 
centuated to him by his shy reticence. He kept himself 
largely apart from other masters ; to the best of my knowl- 
edge I never saw him speak to a woman, and all the time 
he was stewing in the affection which he was incapable of 
expressing. But he had, out and away, by far the most 
forcible and attractive personality of any tutor I came 
across either at school or the University he was one of 
those reserved demi-gods whom a boy obeys, reverences, 
and loves for no ostensible reason. 



CHAPTER VIII 



LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 



WHILE I was still in my second year at Marl- 
borough a thoroughly exciting and delightful 
thing happened at home, for my father was appointed 
Archbishop of Canterbury, and up trooped his pleased 
and approving family to take possession of Lambeth Pal- 
ace and Addington Park with, so far as I was concerned, 
a feeling that he had done great credit to us. Delight- 
ful as Truro had been, we all welcomed the idea of these 
expanded grandeurs, and felt colossally capable of tak- 
ing advantage of them to the utmost. How great a man 
my father had become was most pointedly brought home 
to me by the fact that, when he came down to Marl- 
borough soon after his appointment for my confirmation, 
I could, then and there, measure the altitude of his pin- 
nacle by the fact that there appeared on the school notice- 
board next day an inscription to the effect that His Grace 
had asked that a whole holiday should be given to the 
school in honour of his visit. He had just asked for it, 
so it appeared, and in honour of his visit, it was granted. 
"Can't you be confirmed again?" was the gratifying com- 
ment of friends. "I say, do be confirmed again." 

To me, personally, all the splendour and dignity of his 
office signified nothing : what concerned a boy in the orgy 
of his holidays, was the new sumptuousness of his sur- 
roundings. 

163 



164 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

Stupendous though my father had become, we knew 
but little of his work and of its national significance, and 
it was my mother who to us, far more than he, was ex- 
alted into the zenith. Often since has she told me how 
shy and inadequate she felt on entering London, as she 
now did for the first time, in such a position, but never 
can I conceive of her otherwise than as filling it with the 
supremest enjoyment, which, after all, is the first of a 
hostess's qualities. Her wisdom, her conversational bril- 
liance, above all her intense love of people, just as such, 
nobly filled and fitted the new sphere. The management 
of the great house, with the added concern of the second 
house at Addington, appeared in her a natural and effort- 
less instinct : she took the reins and cracked her whip, and 
the whole equipage bowled swift and smooth along the 
road. The stables were under her control as well; she 
arranged all the comings and goings of my father: out 
rolled his landau with its tall black high-stepping horses 
and gilded harness to take him to the House of Lords, 
and scarce had the great gates below Morton's tower 
clanged open for him, than Maggie and I set out on our 
horses for a ride round the Row, very stiff in top-hats, 
and riding habit and strapped trousers, and then round 
came my mother's victoria, and woe be to the carriage- 
cleaner if the japanned panels failed to reflect with the 
unwavering quality of glass. She would be going to pay 
a couple of calls and visit a dentist, and while she was 
there, the victoria would take Hugh and Nellie to the 
Zoo, and drop them with strict injunctions that in an hour 
precisely they were to pick her up at a fatal door in Old 
Burlington Street, and so proceed homewards to tea. 
Meanwhile the carriage that deposited my father at the 
House could take Arthur to some other rendezvous, and 



LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 165 

once at any rate, the hansom containing the Archbishop 
was prevented from entering the Lambeth Gate, because 
the Archbishop's carriage (containing Hugh and me) 
must be admitted first. Never were children so indulged 
in the matter of equine locomotion, for the riding horses 
clattered in and out, and Hugh returning from a straw- 
hatted visit to the Zoo must in three minutes hurl him- 
self into the top-hatted and black-coated garb which in 
those days was current in the Row, in order to ride with 
my father on his return from the House. One of the five 
of us, at any rate, was kept on tap for a rather stately 
ride with him whenever during the busy day he found 
an hour to spare, and it was a pompous pleasure to see the 
traffic stopped at Hyde Park Corner, so that we might ride 
past saluting policemen through the arch. Physically I 
suppose we enjoyed our fraternal scampers more, but it 
could not help being great fun for a boy of fifteen to 
steer a rather fretful horse that went sideways across the 
street and behaved itself unseemly, while tall buses waited 
for his esteemed progress. After all, if you happened to 
be riding with your father, for whose passage in 
those days all traffic was stayed, you might as well 
enjoy it. . . . 

All such arrangements, all such "fittings in" were a 
pure delight to my mother. She revelled in her dexterity, 
and revelled no less in the multitude of her engagements. 
She loved, after a busy day, to dine at some political 
house, and hear the talk of the hour, and follow that up 
with some party at the Foreign Office, for though she 
cared very little if at all about political questions them- 
selves, she delighted in the froth and bustle and move- 
ment. She was great friends with Mr. Gladstone, though 
she cared not one atom about the Home Rule question, 



166 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

and he in turn had the greatest appreciation of her wit, 
her humour which would strike a spark out of the most 
humdrum of happenings : and I believe it is authentically 
told that when once at Hawarden there was discussion as 
to the identity of the cleverest woman in England, and 
someone suggested my mother as the fittest candidate for 
the post, he said in that impressive voice, reinforced with 
the pointed forefinger, "No, you're wrong: she's the 
cleverest woman in Europe." Quite unfatigued, she 
would be up and dressed in her very oldest clothes before 
seven next morning, and walk for a full hour before 
breakfast, since the rest of the day held for her no leisure 
for exercise. Never was there anyone so acutely observant 
as she, and at breakfast there would be some grotesque or 
comic side-show of the streets for narration. Parks and 
open places were of no use to her at all in those rambles; 
Lambeth Walk, or the .humours of Covent Garden Mar- 
ket were her diversion, and refreshed by these humours 
she tackled her new and delightful day. Never by any 
chance did she go out to lunch, but never by any chance 
did we lunch en famille; guests were invariably there. 
Even more to her mind were her dinner-parties, in the 
selection and arrangement of which she took an infinity of 
rapturous trouble, and the bigger they were the more I 
think she enjoyed them. There was, of course, a great 
deal of clerical entertainment, but half a dozen times in 
the season she gave more secular dinner-parties of about 
thirty guests, when literature and science, and art and 
politics, and the great world magnificently assembled. 
And when the last guest had gone, a piece of invariable 
ritual was that she with any of us children who were at 
home, executed a wild war-dance all over the drawing- 
room in a sort of general jubilation. I remember Lord 



LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 167 

Halsbury coming back unexpectedly to tell my mother 
some story which he had forgotten to mention, and find- 
ing us all at it. 

But however full was the day, my mother seemed pos- 
sessed of complete and unlimited leisure for talk with 
any of us who wanted her. I can remember no occasion 
on which she was too busy for a talk. Her letters could 
wait; anything could wait, and she would slew round 
from her writing-table, saying, "Hurrah! Oh, this is 
nice !" She would listen alert and eager to some infinitesi- 
mal problem, some critical observation, and say, "Now 
tell me exactly why you think that. I don't agree at all. 
Let's have it out." It seemed that nothing in the world 
interested her nearly as much as the point in question, 
and verily I believe that it was so. She projected her 
whole self on to it: she desired nothing so much, just 
then, as to put herself completely in your place, and 
realize, before she formed an opinion of her own, pre- 
cisely what your opinion was. Then invariably the magic 
of her sympathy seized on any point with which she 
agreed, "Quite so: I see that, yes I feel that," she would 
say. "But how about this 1 ? Let me see if I can put it 
to you." 

It was no wonder that the closeness of her special, 
particular relation to each of us was ever growing. The 
primary desire of her heart was to give love : when it was 
given her (and who ever had it in larger abundance 1 ?) 
she welcomed and revelled in it, but her business above 
all was to give. And her love was no soft indulgent 
thing : there was even an austerity in its intenseness, and 
it burned with that lambent quality, which was so char- 
acteristic of her. Never was anyone so like a flame as she : 
her light illuminated you, her ardour warmed and stimu- 



168 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

lated. Withal, there was never anyone who less resembled 
a saint, for she was much too human to be anything of 
the kind; she had no atom of asceticism in her, and with- 
out being at all artistic she adored beauty. 

Spiritual beauty came first, for she loved God more 
than she loved any of His works, but how close to her 
heart was intellectual beauty, things subtly and finely 
observed, things humorously and delicately touched! 
How, too, she hated spiritual ugliness, as expressed by 
priggishness with regard to the Kingdom of Heaven, and 
mental ugliness as expressed by conceit or narrowness, and 
hardly less did she dislike physical ugliness. Her tones 
would rise from a calmness which she found quite im- 
possible to maintain, into a crescendo of violent emphasis 
and capital letters as she said something to the following 
effect : 

"Yes, I know: I'm sure he's a very good man, and 
that's so trying, because he is such a prig, and always 
does his duty, and, my dear, that awful mouth, and the 
Beautiful sentiments that come out of it. Besides he's 
so Very, Very Plain !" 

No one was ever more beset with human frailties. She 
was afraid of getting stout, and in her diary recorded 
solemn vows that she would not eat more than two dishes 
at dinner, nor take sugar. Then came an entry, "Soup, 
fish, pheasant and souffle. What a Pig I am!" . . . 
Or again if she found herself in some difficulty, where a 
precise statement of what had really occurred would make 
things worse, she would say, "I shall have to be very 
diplomatic about it," and a perfectly well justified chorus 
went up from her irreverent family, "That means that 
Ma's going to tell a lie about it." With all her intense 
spirituality, she had no use for conventional worship, 



1 






\ 







; i 







: 




"his grace" (a domestic caricature) 



[Page 169 



LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 171 

and I can hear her say, on an occasion when my father 
was out, "We won't have prayers to-night for a treat." 
Similarly she could never take any emotional interest 
(and I think gave up trying) in Synods and Pan- Anglican 
Conferences, and Bishops' meetings, though she knew 
that her tepidity about these things that concerned my 
father so intimately was a distress to him. But while he 
drove on his fervent way along the roads of organization, 
tradition, ritual and ecclesiastical practice, her religion 
was on quite other lines : prayer and meditation were the 
solitary methods of it, and in the world which she de- 
lighted in, love and sympathy. And whatever she sought 
for and gathered there, with all her own temptations and 
fallings and new resolves, she brought with humble con- 
fident hands and laid them at the feet of Christ. 

Though the beauty of living and sentient beings — 
whether in the region of the soul, the mind or the body — 
made so irresistible an appeal to her, she never really 
cared for the beauty of plants or trees or skies or scenery. 
Just there a firm frontier-line was drawn round the terri- 
tory of her real sympathies, and it accorded very fitly with 
her lack of touch with mere organizations. Just as she 
cared not two straws for the Pan-Anglican Conference, 
yet delighted in the human members of it, so, when stand- 
ing in front of the west fagade of, say Rheims Cathedral, 
or looking across from the Riffel Alp to the Matterhorn, 
her real attention would not be devoted to these silent 
sublimities, but much rather to a cat blinking in the sun, 
or a sparrow building in the eaves. Things must move 
or think or form opinions or commit voluntary actions 
to enchant her, and in the Swiss holidays which often 
followed the end of the London season, I doubt if she ever 
looked with eagerness or wonder at the Matterhorn, ex- 



172 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

cept on the day when she knew that one of her sons was 
somewhere near the summit in the early morning. On 
such another day her eye was glued with enthusiasm on 
the Rothhorn because two of us were making the ascent, 
but towards the Rothhorn in itself, or towards the wav- 
ing of poplars, or the flame of a sunset, she never felt the 
emotional heart-leap. Thus, when August in Switzerland 
or elsewhere was over, the ensuing five months or so at 
Addington, with its delights for us of shooting and riding 
and all the genial thrill of country life, made no appeal 
to her. As far as they affected us, she threw herself into 
them, but at any moment, she would have chosen to be 
in the swim and the thick of things again, and have taken 
those early morning walks down the Lambeth Road with 
the interest of fishshops and costermongers to enlighten 
her, rather than walk under the flaming autumn beech 
trees, or see the frail white children of the spring begin- 
ning to prick through the thawing earth of January. 
There had to be a beating heart in that which enchained 
her; she could not bother about primroses. That may 
have been a limitation, but such limitation as that merely 
stored her force of sympathy and discernment towards 
the rest. She did not attempt to let it dribble out in 
exiguous channels, but conserved the whole vigour of it 
for the supply of the mansions where her treasure and 
her heart lay. In the country also, she was a far more 
defenceless victim against the one strong foe of her 
triumphal banners, and that foe was fear. 

In real trouble, especially when the trouble was con- 
cerned with those she loved best, she walked boldly; no 
one faced the large sorrows and bereavements that fell 
to her destiny with a more courageous front. The mag- 
nitude called forth the faith which unwaveringly sup- 



LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 173 

ported her, but when all seemed peaceful and prosperous, 
she was often a prey to acute imaginative apprehensions. 
She could not bear, for instance, to see us all start out 
riding together, and when the announcement came that 
the half-dozen of riding horses were at the front door, she 
went back to her room on the other side of the house. 
Certainly she had some slight basis for her feelings, for 
among those steeds there was a bad bucker and a rearer. 
None of the riders minded that in the slightest, and away 
went the cavalcade at a violent gallop up the long slope 
of turf in front of the house with "Braemar" in the shape 
of a comma, and "Quentin" playing the piano in the air 
with his forelegs, and "Ajax" kicking up behind, and 
"Peggy" going sideways, just because my father had 
mounted first and smacked "Columba" over the rump 
while the rest of us were betwixt and between the gravel 
and the saddle. There were hurdles stuck up on the 
slope, and Braemer, shrilly squealing, bucked over the 
first and Ajax ran out, and Peggy trod solemnly on the 
top of one, and Quentin still hopping on his hind legs 
refused and was whacked, and my father went pounding 
on ahead as we rocketed after him. He was not a good 
horseman, but he had no knowledge of fear, and, though 
he avoided the hurdles, he went tobogganing down the 
steep sides of Croham Hurst with Columba slipping and 
sliding on the pebbles and putting her foot into rabbit 
holes, while her rider with slack rein enjoyed it all enor- 
mously. In the meantime my mother had dreadful visions 
of two or three of us being brought back on hurdles, and 
carried into the house. But exactly at that point her 
essential courage knocked her nervousness on the head, 
for she would not at any price have had any one of us 
not go out riding. Only, she didn't want to see the st: ~ .. 



174 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

It was this vague fear that was her enemy all her life, 
and it could pounce on any quarry. She did not really 
believe that the corpses of her children were soon to be 
brought back to her, any more than she really believed 
that when my father had a bad cold, it was speedily to de- 
velop into double pneumonia, but she was prey in imagi- 
nation to these disastrous possibilities. Hardly ever did 
she suffer under them as regards herself; once only do I 
remember her conjuring up a personal spectre. On that 
occasion she got the idea that she was going to die before 
the end of the month, a prognostication which she un- 
fortunately made public. Thereupon, as the days went 
by, some one of her children hurried from the tea-table 
every evening, and stood spectre-like in the corner of the 
room, and in a sepulchral voice said, "Nine days now" : 
or "Eight days now," until the fatal and last evening 
of her prophetic intuition arrived. The "To-night" was 
received with roars of laughter, and she was in brilliant 
health and spirits next morning, when she ought to have 
been a corpse. She laughed at her fears herself (which 
is just the reason why I treat them humorously now) but, 
for all her laughter, they were year after year a miserable 
bugbear to her, mostly and mainly during the leisurely 
months at Addington. Oftenest they were quite vague, 
but couched to pounce on any excuse for definiteness : if 
my father had a cold she would evoke the image of pneu- 
monia, if he was tired she would conjure up visions of a 
breakdown. She kept these groundless imaginings to her- 
self, and no one could ever have guessed how often she 
was a victim to them, or how heavily they rode her. They 
did not, except quite occasionally, get between her and 
♦•he sunlight, for she forced them into the shadow, caught 
t jm and shut them in cupboards, steadily and continu- 



LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 175 

ally disowned them. And when any real trouble came 
they haunted her no more ; she rose serene and faithful to 
any great occasion, welcoming it almost, as she had done 
with Martin's death, as a direct dealing from God, receiv- 
ing it sacramentally. 

I wonder if children ever ran so breathless a race in 
pursuit of manifold interests and enjoyments as did we 
in those years when our ages ranged from the early twen- 
ties to the early teens, and the Christmas holidays in par- 
ticular, brought us together. One year, about 1884, a 
snowfall was succeeded by a week's frost, and that by 
another week of icy fog, and the foggy week I look back 
on as having given us the fullest scope of hazardous ac- 
tivity in hopeless circumstances, for shooting and riding 
were impossible. We made a toboggan-run which soon 
became unmitigated ice, down a steep hill in the park 
among Scotch firs that loomed dim and menacing through 
the mist. Half-way down the hill, just where the pace 
was swiftest, and the toboggan skidding most insanely, 
grew one of these firs close to the track, and on the other 
side was a bramble-bush. From the top you could not 
see this gut at all, and with eyes peering agonizedly 
through the thick air you waited for the appearance of 
this opening somewhere ahead. Sometimes you saw so 
late that the bramble-bush or the Scotch fir must inevit- 
ably receive you, and there was just time to slide off 
behind, be rolled on the hard glazed snow, and hear the 
plunge of the toboggan in the bramble-bush, or its crash 
against the Scotch fir. If you got through safely, a second 
and more open slope succeeded and you pursued your 
way across the path between the church and the house, 
and bumped into the kitchen-garden fence. Bruised and 



176 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

unwearied we took the injured toboggans to the estate 
carpenter, whose time at Christmas must have been chiefly 
occupied with repairing these fractures, and played golf 
over the nine holes which we had made along the slope 
in front of the house, on the snow and in a fog. The 
greens, which were about as large as tablecloths, had 
been swept, and the boy who had the honour whacked his 
ball in the conjectured direction, and ran like mad after 
it. When he had found it, he shouted and his opponent 
drove in the direction of his voice. If he sliced or pulled, 
he too ran like mad in the conjectured direction; if he 
drove straight his ball was probably marked by the first 
driver. The thrillingest excitement was when, driving 
first, you topped your ball or spouted it in the air, for 
then you crouched as you heard the crack of the second 
ball, which whizzed by you unseen. Football in the top 
passage with bedroom doors for goals ushered in lunch 
and after lunch we skated on dreadful skates called 
"Acmes" or "Caledonians," which clipped themselves on 
to the heels and soles of the boot, and came off and 
slithered across the ice at the moment when you proposed 
to execute a turn. Hugh despised my figure-skating (and 
I'm sure I don't wonder) and christened himself a speed 
skater. The pond was of no great extent and fringed on 
one side by tall rhododendron thickets, into which he 
crashed when unable to negotiate a corner. 

The evening closing in early was the dawn of the in- 
tellectual labours of the day. The Saturday Magazine 
made frequent appearances, burgeoning like Aaron's rod 
into miraculous blossom of prose and poetry: between- 
whiles Arthur composed voluntaries to be played on the 
organ in the chapel at prayers, Nellie studied the violin, 
Hugh produced a marionette theatre, and wrote a highly 



LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 177 

original play for it, called The Sandy Desert; or, Where 
is the Archbishop? and Maggie made oil pictures of her 
family of Persian cats. Once at least during Christmas 
holidays we all jointly wrote a play : it was The Spiritual- 
ist one year, in which there was a slashing exposure of 
mediums; another year we dramatized The Rose and the 
Ring in operatic form with original lyrics set to popular 
tunes. With the exception of Nellie, our voices were 
singularly inefficient and completely untrained, which 
was part of the fun of it. To these plays the neigh- 
bourhood was invited, and all the servants and lodge- 
keepers formed a solid mass at the back. At one of them, 
Arthur for some reason, must be disguised as a young 
woman, six feet two high, with a yard or so of trousers 
showing below the skirt. This impersonation made a 
kitchen-maid laugh so hysterically, that the play had to 
pause while she was taken out by two housemaids, and her 
yells died away as she retreated down the back-stairs. 

Life in those holidays was an orgy, celebrated in an 
atmosphere of absolutely ceaseless argument and discus- 
sion. Every question rose to boiling-point: for while 
we regarded each other with strong and quite unsenti- 
mental affection we were violently critical of each other. 
We drew biting caricatures of my father going to sleep 
after tea, of my mother keenly observant above and not 
through her spectacles, of Hugh falling off Ajax, of any 
ludicrous and humorous posture. But above all it was 
writing that most enthralled us, and innumerable were 
the quires of sermon-paper that yielded up their fair white 
lives to our scribblings. These were now beginning to 
enter a more professional arena than the Saturday Maga- 
zine; Nellie, then at Lady Margaret's Hall in Oxford, 
had, before she was twenty, published an article on 



178 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

Crabbe in Temple Bar; Arthur, a year or two older, had 
written his first book, Arthur Hamilton, in the form of 
an imaginary memoir, and Maggie and I were in the 
throes of a joint story, in which I can perceive the infancy 
of a novel called Dodo. This was abandoned before com- 
pletion, but in a moraine of forgotten dustinesses, I came 
across some few pages of it the other day and really felt 
that there was some notion in it, some conscious attempt 
anyhow, to convey character by means of conversation 
rather than by analysis, an achievement in the direction 
of which, in spite of dispiriting results, I am still grubbing 
away. There certainly, in that heap of ancient manu- 
script fortuitously preserved, was the conscious striving 
after psychical dialogue, in which the interlocutors re- 
vealed themselves. Trivial as might be the personalities 
revealed, the idea of the excited authors was to avoid 
narrated analysis, and to convict and justify their char- 
acters out of their own mouths. There was a crisis of 
creativeness in the writing of it, for we firmly and de- 
signedly intended that a certain middle-aged lady, at 
whose feet everybody else fell flat in adoration of her 
tact and her sympathy and her comprehension, should 
"be" my mother. But, such is the waywardness of ideal- 
istic portraiture, we found, about Chapter VI, that though 
she was already supposedly installed on the throne of 
tact and comprehension, before which everybody else 
bowed the knee, she had not justified the part which we 
had cast for her, for she really had said little more than 
"I feel so deeply for you," or "Pass the mustard." We 
were determined that she should reveal her incomparable 
humanity by the sympathetic dialogues in which we en- 
gaged her, but she was so tactful that she never said any- 
thing at all that bore on the problems which were sub- 



LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 179 

mitted to her. In the book to which I have alluded, she 
certainly appears as "Mrs. Vivian," who, as may faintly 
be remembered, is supposed to be possessed of super- 
human tact and insight, taking painful situations with 
calming and yet exhilarating effect. For the satisfaction 
of the curious, it may be stated that Mrs. Vivian was the 
one live model in the book and was completely unrecog- 
nisable. When first we enthusiastically scribbled at its 
earlier incarnation, my sister and I were at the ages of 
nineteen and seventeen, and for the very reason, namely, 
that we thought of my mother in our adoring limning 
of her, the presentment is not only unlike her, but unlike 
anybody at all. 

We went to Addington for a few weeks at Easter, and 
the sojourn then was, according to my mother, of the 
nature of a picnic. As a matter of fact there was not 
really anything very picnicky about it ; the drawing-room, 
it is true, was not used, but we managed with the ante- 
room, the Chinese room, the schoolroom, my father's 
study and her own room, by way of sitting-rooms, and 
perhaps part of the household remained at Lambeth. 
But to her vivid sense, to her delight of using all things 
to the utmost, this constituted a very informal way of 
life, for when she was running a house, everything must 
be, in its own scale, spick-and-span and complete. You 
might, for instance, dine on bread and cheese and a glass 
of beer, but the cheese must be the best cheese, the bread 
of the crispest, and the beer must be brimmed with froth. 
Short of completeness and perfection, whatever your 
scale was, you were roughing it, you were picnicking. She 
did not at all dislike picnicking, but It Was picnicking, 
and why not say so? For herself, with her passion for 
people (like Dr. Johnson she thought that one green field 



180 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

was like another green field, and would prefer a walk 
down Fleet Street) she would sooner have stopped in Lon- 
don, but my father needed this break in the six months of 
his busy London life. But to his volcanic energy and 
vitality, such a holiday was of the nature of a compulsion 
and a medicine rather than an enjoyment. In the long 
run he was refreshed by it, but the getting out of the 
shafts was always trying to him, and usually resulted in 
a fit of depression, such as I have described before. When 
he was very hard worked, he never suffered from this; 
it was when he was obliged to rest that these irritable 
glooms descended on him, and I particularly connect 
them, during these years, with the Easter holiday. All 
the time, as he once told me when talking of them, he 
would be struggling and agonizing to get his head out of 
those deep waters, but was unable to until the nervous 
reaction had spent itself, and the pendulum swung back 
again. By now we children had begun to understand that, 
and though this mood of his was a damper on mirth and 
generally an awful bore, we no longer feared him when 
he was like that but "carried on," very sorry for him, 
and sincerely hoping he would be better next day. The 
person who felt it most was undoubtedly my mother : he 
was miserable and she knew it, and knew the pathos of 
his futile strivings to get rid of it, and her picnic was a 
melancholy and anxious one till that cloud lifted. Often, 
however, she and my father went to Florence for Easter, 
where they stayed with Lady Crawford at the Villa Pal- 
mieri, and of all the holiday sojournings it was that which 
he enjoyed most keenly. He was absolutely indefatig- 
able where churches or sacred art were concerned, because 
of the cause which had inspired painter and architect. 
To him the achievement for which the architect builded, 



LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 181 

the sculptor chiselled, the musicians composed, and the 
artist painted, must be the palpable and direct service 
of God, and just as he would gaze in genuine rapture at 
a second-rate Madonna, whereas a portrait or even a 
Primavera would leave him cold, so, without any knowl- 
edge or appreciation of music he would listen to Handel's 
Messiah, while a Wagner opera, or a symphony by 
Beethoven, had he ever listened or heard such, would have 
been meaningless to him. Of ecclesiastical architecture, 
again, its periods or its characteristics, he had a profound 
knowledge, but whether a house was Elizabethan or 
Georgian was a matter of much smaller interest to him. 
He did not truly care, to put it broadly, who built a 
column and when and how, or painted a picture and when 
and how, so long as those monuments of art were only 
directed towards human and aesthetic enjoyment. The 
natural works of God, the woods at Addington, the moun- 
tain ranges of Switzerland, he admiringly loved as being 
in themselves direct divine expressions, but if the work 
of man insinuated itself, he liked it in proportion as 
it was religious in its aims. 

One exception he made, and that was in favour of 
Greek and Roman antiquities and the language of the 
classics, and I am sure he enjoyed making a translation 
of some English poem into Virgilian hexameters or 
Sophoclean iambics fully as much as he enjoyed the origi- 
nal version. Latin and Greek, especially Greek, were to 
him only a little below the Pentecostal tongues: of all 
human achievements they were the noblest flowers. To 
him a classical education was the only education : he rated 
a boy's abilities largely by his power to translate and to 
imitate classical lore, and to wander himself in these 
fields was his chiefest intellectual recreation. He loved 



182 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

to unpack, so to speak, some Greek word compounded 
with prepositions, and insist on the value of each, over- 
loading the dissected members of it with meanings that 
never conceivably entered into the mind of its author, and 
his own style in weighed and deliberate composition was 
founded on the model of these interpretations; the 
sentences were overloaded with meanings beyond what 
the language could bear; he packed his phrases till they 
creaked. But highest of all in the beloved language, with 
a great gulf fixed below it and above the masterpieces of 
classical literature, came the New Testament, which he 
studied and interpreted to us as under a microscope. That 
eager reverence was like a lover's adoration : his interpre- 
tations might be fanciful, and such as he would never 
have made in any other commentings, but here his search 
for hidden meanings in simple phrases had just that 
quality of tender and exquisite scrutiny. The subject of 
this study was his life, and the smallest of its details must 
be searched out, and squeezed to yield a drop more of 
sacred essence. . . . On any other topic he would have 
criticized the Hellenistic Greek, as falling far below 
classical standards, but, as it was, he accepted it as verb- 
ally inspired, and no enquiry was too minute. Rather 
curiously, collations of differing texts did not engage 
him, nor did he touch on Higher Criticism. The text of 
his own Greek Testament was all that concerned him, 
there was the whole matter, and on to it he turned the 
full light of his intellect and his enthusiasm, without 
criticism but minutely and lovingly poring over it, as it 
actually and traditionally was. 

From Monday morning until Saturday night these 
weeks at Addington, especially at Christmas, were to us 
a whirl of delightful activities from the moment that 



LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 183 

chapel service and Bible lesson were over in the morning, 
till evening service at ten o'clock at night. But Sunday 
was a day set so much apart from the rest that it hardly 
seemed to belong to Addington at all. There was early 
communion in the chapel, unless it was celebrated after 
the eleven o'clock service in church; morning service in 
church was succeeded by lunch, lunch by a slow family 
walk during which my father read George Herbert to us; 
the walk was succeeded by a Bible reading with him, and 
then came tea. After tea was evening service in church, 
and after Sunday supper, he read the Pilgrim's Progress 
aloud until we had compline in chapel. To fill up inter- 
vals we might read certain Sunday books, the more ma- 
ture successors of Bishop Heber and The Rocky Island 
and Agathos. No shoal of relaxation emerged from the 
roaring devotional flood ; if at meals the conversation be- 
came too secular, it was brought back into appropriate 
channels; there was even a set of special graces before 
and after meals to be used on Sunday, consisting of short 
versicles and responses quite bewildering to any guest 
staying in the house. No games of any sort or kind were 
played, not even those which like lawn-tennis or golf 
entailed no labour on the part of servants. However 
fair a snow covered Fir Mount, no toboggan that day 
made its perilous descent, and though the pond might be 
spread with delectable ice no skates profaned its satin on 
the Day of Rest. The Day of Rest in fact, owing chiefly 
to this prohibition on reasonable relaxation, became a 
day of pitiless fatigue. We hopped, like "ducks and 
drakes," from one religious exercise to another, relent- 
lessly propelled. 

To my father, I make no doubt, with his intensely de- 
votional mind, this strenuous Sunday was a time of re- 



184 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

freshment. It is perfectly true that he often went to 
sleep in church, and if on very hot Sundays, the walk 
was abandoned, and we read aloud in turns from some 
saintly chronicle, under the big cedar on the lawn, not 
only he, but every member of the family, except the 
reader (we read in turn), went to sleep too. But he dozed 
off to the chronicle of St. Francis and came back to it 
again; nothing jarred. Thus ordered, Sunday was a per- 
fect day for one of his temperament; no work was done 
on it, no week-day breeze ruffled its devotional stillness, 
but his appreciation of it postulated that all of us should 
share to the full in its spiritual benefits. He did not be- 
lieve that for himself Sunday could be spent more profit- 
ably, and so we were all swept, regardless of its private 
effect on us, into the tide. What he did not allow for 
was that on other temperaments, that which so aptly ful- 
filled the desires of his own produced a totally different 
impression. That day, for us, was one of crushing bore- 
dom and unutterable fatigue. Certain humorous gleams 
occasionally relieved the darkness, as when the devil 
entered into me on one occasion when Lives of the Saints 
came to me by rotation, for reading aloud. There was 
the serene sunlight outside the shade of the cedar, posi- 
tively gilding the tennis court, there was the croquet lawn 
starving for the crack of balls, and there too, underneath 
the cedar was my somnolent family, Hugh with swoony 
eyes, laden with sleep, Nellie and Maggie primly and 
decorously listening, their eyelids closed, like Miss 
Matty's, because they listened better so, and my father, 
for whom and by whom this treat was arranged, with head 
thrown back and mouth nakedly open. . . . And then 
came Satan, or at least Puck. ... I read four lines of 
the page to which we had penetrated, then read a few 



LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 185 

sentences out of the page that had already been read. 
Deftly and silently, but keeping a prudent finger in the 
proper place, I turned over a hundred pages, and droned 
a paragraph about a perfectly different saint. Swiftly 
turning back I read some few lines out of the introduction 
to the whole volume, and then, sending prudence to the 
winds, found the end of the chapter on which we were 
engaged. I gave them a little more about St. Catherine 
of Siena, a little more from the introduction, then in case 
anyone happened to be awake read the concluding sen- 
tences of the chapter about St. Francis and stopped. 

The cessation of voice caused Nellie to awake, and with 
an astounding hypocrisy, subsequently brought home to 
her, she exclaimed: 

"Oh, how interesting!" 

Her voice aroused my father. There we all were sit- 
ting under the cedar, reading about St. Francis. Hugh 
had awoke, Maggie had awoke: it was a peaceful de- 
votional Sunday afternoon. 

"Wonderful !" he said. "Is that the end, Fred?" 

"Yes, that's all," said Fred. 

Fred was also a passive actor in another Sunday 
humour. My father had noticed in me a certain restless- 
ness at readings, some twitching of the limbs at a Bible 
lesson, or whatnot, and in order to confirm me in the 
right practice of the day, had looked out a book in his 
library about Sunday, which he recommended me to read, 
without having sufficiently ascertained the contents of it 
himself. Judge of my rapture when I found a perfectly 
convincing chapter, showing how the sad, joyless, unre- 
laxed English Sunday was purely an invention of Puri- 
tan times. My father had given me the book to convince 
me of the antique sanctity of the Addington use: the 



186 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

book told me that from the patristic times onwards, no 
such idea of Sunday as we religiously practised had ever 
entered into the heads of Christians, or had ever dawned 
on the world until the sourness of Puritans robbed the 
day of its traditional joy. It had been a day of festa, of 
relaxation from the tedious round of business, and all the 
faithful dressed themselves in their best clothes for fun, 
and village sports were held, and hospitality enlivened 
the drab week. Sure enough they went to church in the 
morning, and after that abandoned themselves to jollity. 
With suppressed giggles I flew to my mother's room to 
tell her the result of this investigation, and she steered a 
course so wonderful that not even then could I chart it. 
Her sympathetic amusement I knew was all mine, but 
somehow she abandoned no whit of her loyalty to my 
father's purpose in giving me the book. I had imagined 
myself (with rather timorous glee, for which I wanted her 
support) pronouncing sentence on his Sunday upon the 
very evidence which he had given me to judge it by, but 
some consummate stroke of tact on my mother's part made 
all that to be quite out of the question. How she did it I 
have no idea, but surely the very test of tact lies in the 
fact that yoi. don't know how it is done. Tact explained 
ceases to be tact, and degenerates into reason on the one 
hand or futility on the other. Certainly I never con- 
fronted my father with this evidence, and Sunday went 
on precisely as usual. Sometimes Hugh and I played 
football in the top passage, but you mightn't kick hard 
for fear of detected reverberations through the skylight 
of the central hall. 

There is a play by some Italian dramatist, which I 
once saw Duse act: perhaps it is by D'Annunzio, but I 



LAMBETH AND ADDINGTON 187 

cannot identify it. In the second act anyhow, the cur- 
tain went up on Duse, alone on the stage. She wrote a 
letter, she put some flowers in a vase without speech, 
and still without speech, she opened a window at the 
back, and leaned out of it. She paused long with her 
back to the audience, and then turning round again said, 
half below her breath, "Aprile." After that the action 
of the play proceeded but not till, in that long pause and 
that one word, she had given us the magic of spring. 
. . . Not otherwise, but just so, were those Addington 
holidays, when I was sixteen and seventeen, my April, 
and thus the magic of spring in those seasons of Christ- 
mas and Easter and September came to me. Bulbs and 
seeds buried in my ground began to spike the earth, and 
the soft buds and leaves to burst their woolly sheaths. 
It was the time for the rooting up, in that spring-garden- 
ing, of certain weeds; it was the time also of planting 
the seedlings which should flower later, and of grafting 
fresh slips on to a stem that was forming fibre in the place 
of soft sappy shoots. Above all it was the time of re- 
ceiving more mature and indelible impressions, and there 
is scarcely anything which in later life I have loved or 
hated, or striven for or avoided that is not derivable from 
some sprig of delight or distaste planted during those 
seasons of first growth. Childhood and earlier boyhood 
were more of a greenhouse, where early growths were 
nurtured in a warmed windlessness ; now they were 
pricked out and put in the beds, where they had to learn 
the robustness which would make them resist the inclem- 
encies of a less sheltered life. Some died, scorched by the 
sun or battered by the rain ; the rest, I suppose, had enough 
vitality to make sun and rain alike serve their growth. 
Above all it was the time of learning to enjoy, no longer 



188 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

in the absolutely unreflective manner of a child, but in a 
manner to some extent reasoned and purposed. Some 
kind of philosophy, some conscious digestive process be- 
gan to stir below mere receptivity. I looked not only at 
what the experiences with which I fed the lusty appetites 
of life were at the moment, but at the metabolism they 
would undergo when I had eaten them. But of all mental 
habits then forming, the one for which I most bless those 
lovely years, was the habit of enjoyment, of looking for 
(and finding) in every environment some pleasure and 
interest. That habit, no doubt, with all our games, our 
collections, our scribblings had long been churned at: 
about now it solidified. And by far the most active and 
assiduous of external agencies that caused this— the dairy- 
maid, so to speak, who was never weary of this magnifi- 
cent churning — was my mother. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 

THE dreadful "season of snows and sins" was already 
beginning to approach again: in other words more 
scholarship examinations at Oxford and Cambridge began 
to pile their fat clouds on the horizon. These were the 
snows : the sins were my own in not taking any intelligent 
interest in the subjects which would make them "big with 
blessing." Certainly I had been sent to school to learn 
Latin and Greek among other things, but the other things 
were so vastly more interesting. I was usually about 
tenth in any form where I happened to be, and I remem- 
ber a very serious letter from my father (after a series 
of consecutive tenths) saying that he had always observed 
that boys who were about tenth, could always do much 
better if they chose : boys lower in a form were those who 
often tried very hard, but were deficient in ability. I do 
not think I was so diabolically minded as to consider this 
a reason for doing worse, but certainly I declined from 
that modest eminence where boys who could do better 
pleasantly sunned themselves, and sank half a dozen 
places lower. By one of those wonderful coincidences 
which from time to time nourish starving optimists, it 
so happened that in the summer of 1884 an unusually 
large number of the sixth left school, and thus seventeen 
promotions were made out of the fifth form, the very last 
of which consisted of myself. With all the dignity and 

189 



190 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

decoration of sixth form upon me, I had somehow justi- 
fied my existence again, and the stigma of being seven- 
teenth was swallowed up in the glory of being in the 
sixth. I had a study of my own, instead of being one 
of a herd in a classroom. I could make small boys fill 
my brewing kettle for me and run errands, and I could, 
without incurring criticism, wear my cap at the back of 
my head. 

Something, I fancy, in an address which the headmaster 
gave to the new sixth form at the beginning of the Sep- 
tember term, was said about duties and responsibilities: 
if it was, it must have rebounded out of one ear without 
penetration. For the average schoolboy is, I believe, 
waterproof to such suggestions, if they come from with- 
out : he will get his idea of his duties and responsibilities 
purely from his own instinct, or rather from the collective 
instinct of his contemporaries, and his notion of proper 
behaviour in himself and others is practically entirely 
built on what he and they consider to be "good form." 
These commandments are the most elusive and variable of 
decalogues, but usually wholesome, and completely auto- 
cratic. Immorality, for instance, at that time was bad 
form, though language which would have blistered the 
paint off a sewer, was perfectly permissible, if you wished 
to indulge in it : bullying was hopelessly beyond the pale, 
gambling and drinking, which figure so menacingly in 
those lurid histories designed to make mothers tremble for 
their innocent lambs, were absolutely unthought of. We 
(the sixth form generally) were a set of genial and 
energetic pagans, caring most of all for each other, next 
for games, but doing quite a decent amount of work; in- 
deed, it was rather the fashion, and became more so, to 
be industrious in certain well-defined patches. 



THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 191 

Nobody took the very slightest interest in such subjects 
as French or mathematics, and considering the way in 
which they were taught, it would have been truly remark- 
able if we had. An aged man, mumbling to himself, 
wrote out equations and made pictures of Euclidian prop- 
osition on a blackboard, apparently for his own amuse- 
ment, without any reference to his audience. When he 
had had enough of it, he told us to close all books, and 
write out the proposition he had demonstrated. Some- 
times you could, sometimes you couldn't, and if you 
couldn't very, frequently, you had to do it twice and show 
it up next school. If the aged man remembered to ask 
for it, you had forgotten to do it, but usually he forgot 
too. But what it was all about was a blank mystery, until 
it became necessary to find out, because elementary Euclid 
and algebra formed a part of the Oxford and Cambridge 
certificate examination. When that approached, we put 
our heads together and found out for ourselves. 

French was equally hopeless : once a week we prepared 
a couple of pages of some French history for the head- 
master. Whatever French he knew he certainly did not 
impart: of the spoken language I had picked up enough 
abroad to be aware that he would have been practically 
unintelligible to a Frenchman. I believe that both these 
subjects were admirably taught on the modern side; on 
the classical side the study of them was a mere farce. 
But at Latin and Greek we worked quite reasonably and 
intelligently: it was "good form" to take an interest in 
them, and it was not thought the least odd if somebody 
was found reading the Apology of Socrates (in a transla- 
tion) out of school hours, though it had nothing to do 
with class-work, or that I treasured a piece of white mar- 



192 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

ble which my sister Nellie on a foreign tour had picked 
up on the Acropolis. 

The real interest of life centred in "the Alley," a pas- 
sage running above a couple of classrooms in the school 
buildings, out of which on each side opened minute studies 
inhabited by sixth-form in-college boys. Some of these 
were double studies shared by two occupants, but most 
were single; inviolable castles if the owner chose to shut 
the door. Inside there was room for a table, a hanging 
bookcase, and perhaps three chairs if you sat close; but 
who would dream of measuring Paradise by cubic con- 
tents? Never surely was there a more harmonious de- 
mocracy, and it was seldom that doors were shut; the in- 
habitants, unless tied to their books, drifted up and down 
and round and round like excited bubbles in some loqua- 
cious backwater. Within the limits of "good form" every 
freedom of action and opinion was allowed, and those 
limits were really very reasonable ones. It must not be 
supposed that "good form" was ever discussed at all: it 
was merely the unwritten, unspoken code, which held 
things together, and undoubtedly the gravest offense 
against it was a hint of condescension or superiority. If 
you were so fortunate as to get into the school fifteen 
or achieve any distinction, "the Alley" pooled the credit, 
and woe be to any who showed "side" to the Alleyites. 
If you liked (hardly anybody did) to be extremely neat 
in dress, to get yourself up to kill, to wear buttonholes, 
you were perfectly at liberty to do so; but if you showed 
the least "swank" over your rosebud, the witnesses of 
your enormity would probably stroll thoughtfully away 
and return embellished with dandelions and groundsel. 
That was sarcasm, popularly called "sarc," and was a 
weapon ruthlessly employed towards the superior per- 



THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 193 

son. No one could stand a conspiracy of "sarc" for long: 
it was better to mend your ways and reduce your swollen 
head. Only one member of the Alley was ever known 
to resist a continual course of "sarc," and he, poor fellow, 
was goaded by the shafts of love, for he adored to dis- 
traction one of the masters' daughters who appeared un- 
aware of his existence. This was unusual conduct, but 
he was at liberty to squander emotion on her if he wished ; 
what roused the Alley to arms, so that they loaded them- 
selves with "sarc," as with hand grenades, was that he 
affected to despise all who were not enslaved by some 
pretty-faced maiden. Then, as was right, he found hair- 
pins mysteriously appearing on his carpet, and heard his 
Christian name called in faint girlish falsetto from a 
neighbouring study, and discovered notes with passionate 
declarations of love and a wealth of suggestive allusions 
that I would no longer "pollewt" my pen with describ- 
ing nestling in his coat-pocket. But such was the innate 
depravity of his amorous heart that he really didn't seem 
to mind the most withering "sarc." . . . Games were 
not compulsory in the sixth, and in consequence, though 
athletes were in the majority, athleticism was no longer 
automatic, and now a boy would suffer no loss of esteem, 
or offend any sense of decency, if he chose not to play any 
game whatever. A wide tolerance for your fellows was 
the first lesson of the Alley; liberty, equality, and fra- 
ternity were its admirable guides to life. 

Next year, when, by another intervention of Provi- 
dence, I suddenly found myself head of my house, with 
a magnificent apartment next the bathroom for my habi- 
tation, the snowstorm of scholarship examinations burst 
over me. For a suitable inducement in the shape of a 
scholarship or exhibition, I was prepared to go to New, 



194 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

Magdalen, or Worcester at Oxford, or to King's College, 
Cambridge; but not a single one of these ancient (or shall 
we say antiquated?) seats of learning would, after exam- 
ining me, put their hands in their pockets in order to 
secure me. I was very busy at the time, for I was editing 
The Marlburian and conducting the school "Penny Read- 
ings," and playing football for them and rackets, and not 
being able to find time for everything I let my school- 
work slide altogether and, when the depressing results 
came out, bore failure with admirable fortitude. In other 
words, I did not care at all; if anything, I was rather 
pleased, because I began dimly to conceive the possibility 
of being allowed to stop at school for an extra year, 
whereas I should normally have left in the summer. But 
Marlborough was now to me the most amiable of dwell- 
ings; there were friends there whom I could not bear the 
thought of parting with ; there were schemes that I could 
not bear to leave unfulfilled, and I directed all the in- 
genuity of which I was capable to secure my remaining 
here for an unheard-of year longer. From being re- 
signed to failure I passed, as my plans matured, into being 
enraptured with it. A false step, a misplaced interview, 
might spell ruin, and after much thought I went to the 
headmaster with a homily all about myself. It was clear 
that I had not attained a decent standard of scholarship 
yet ; surely my coming years at the University would be 
more profitable if I was better prepared to take advantage 
of them*? My father was bent on my having a career of 
some distinction there, and would not he be far more 
likely to find his ambitions for me realized if I made 
there the better start that another year at school would 
give me? Another year now of undiluted classics. . . . 
This scheme enlisted his sympathy, and he said he 



THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 195 

would talk to my house-master about it, who might not, 
however, want to keep me in such august seniority. But 
as to that I had no doubt whatever, for this gentleman 
had only just come to the house, and his seat in the saddle 
was at present remarkably uncertain. He used to ask 
members of the sixth, and in especial the head of the 
house, to go the rounds for him when it was the hour for 
him to parade the dormitories at night ; he would do any- 
thing to shirk disciplinary contact if a senior member of 
the house could accomplish this for him. No senior mem- 
ber of the house felt the slightest nervousness at what so 
terrified the house-master: we visited the dormitories, sat 
on a bed here and there, talking to friends, helped a strag- 
gler who had not finished a construing lesson for the 
morning, and eventually went back to the house-master's 
room to say good night and report that all was well. 
Then he gave you a slice of cake, and tried to conceal his 
pipe, and hoped that nobody in the house smoked (which, 
as a matter of fact, they didn't), and everything was 
very pleasant and comfortable. The house was behaving 
quite well, because prefects and senior boys had it well 
in hand ; but if I left, my successor as head of the house 
was bound to be a very mild, spectacled youth, and, with- 
out conceit, I felt sure that my house-master would prefer 
to keep me, who during this last year had managed it 
quite nicely for him. His attitude came off according 
to plan, and we had quite an affecting interview. 

Then came the clincher to this careful spade-work, and 
I got both him and the headmaster to write to my father 
urging him to allow me to stop another year, not only 
for my own good (interview A), but for the well-being 
of the house (interview B). The double appeal was suc- 
cessful : it was settled that I should stay for another year, 



196 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

and then go up to King's College, Cambridge. As I 
would be over nineteen when the next scholarship exam- 
ination came round, I was ineligible on account of ad- 
vanced age, and thus, while the snowstorms were next 
vexing my contemporaries, I should sit serene and calm 
on the sunny slopes of antiquity. I had no notion of 
using this extra year of life (for so it appeared then) for 
idle or unedifying purposes. I meant to work hard at sub- 
jects that would eventually "tell." I meant also, with 
a suspicion of priggishness, to make the house streak a 
meteor-like path across the starry sky of school. We were 
going to be a model of enlightenment (this was the am- 
bition) ; we were to win the racket house-cup, and the 
fives cup, and the gymnasium cup, and the football cup, 
and the singing cup (for, like the Meistersingers, every 
house competed in singing), and two vocal quartettes, 
triumphantly performed, gave a fifth challenge cup. 
There it was — forty boys were to be drilled into win- 
ning every event of this immense pentathlon. A sixth 
cup, possibly within the range, was the cricket cup; but 
in the matter of cricket the house generally was no more 
than a company of optimistic amateurs. The other five 
cups seemed within the limits of probable achievement, 
and who knew but that a breezy eleven, rather ignorant 
of cricket, except for the presence of the best left-hand 
bowler in the school, might not effect some incredible 
miracle*? Never has anybody's head been so stuffed 
full of plans as was mine when I went back a year later 
than was reasonable for this series of inconceivable ex- 
citements. 

The head of the school this year was Eustace Miles. 
We had already been great friends for many terms, and 
now this friendship ripened into a unique alliance; from 



THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 197 

morning till night we were together, and seethed in proj- 
ects, failures and accomplishments. There was no sport 
or industry in which we were not associated. No mat- 
ter came up within the jurisdiction of either of us in 
which each did not consult the other. He was going up 
for a classical scholarship at King's, Cambridge, for we 
had quite settled not to have done with each other when 
school was over. I had to get to learn some classics some- 
how, and so together we concocted the most delightful 
plan, namely, that we should neither of us do any French, 
mathematics, or history, but should be excused coming 
into school altogether while such lessons were in progress, 
devoting ourselves in the privacy of our studies to classics. 
The headmaster most sensibly saw and sanctioned our 
point, and consequently we had a whole holiday one day 
a week, and on two other days only one hour in school. 
For me that voluntary unsupervised reading, tfi \ c brows- 
ing at will in Attic and Roman pastures, gave me pre- 
cisely all I had lacked before; the two dead languages 
stirred and lived, the dry bones moved, and the sinews 
and the flesh came up on them, and the skin covered them, 
and the winds of the delicate Athenian air breathed upon 
them. Four years ago Beesly had awakened in me the 
sense of the Greek genius for beauty, but not till now had 
the flame spread to the language. That for me had 
always smouldered and smoked under the damp of gram- 
mar and accents; now, when I could learn as I chose, it 
flared up. Prosody and inflexions, moods and cases, all 
that was tedious to acquire, need no longer be learned by 
rule ; the knowledge of rules began to dawn on me mere- 
ly by incessantly coming across examples of them, and 
I began to learn under the tuition of admiration. The 
same thrilled interest invaded Latin also, and it was no 



198 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

longer what could be made of the languages in English 
that attracted me, but what they were in themselves. 
Such study did not lead to accurate scholarship, but it 
gave me what was of much greater value to one who did 
not mean to spend his life in editing school-books, namely, 
an inkling of the infinite flexibility of language and joy 
in the cadences of words, while from the scholastic stand- 
point it added the stimulus which enabled me not to re- 
main at Cambridge such a hopeless dunce at classics as I 
had hitherto always been. All the teaching I had ever 
received had failed to make me apply such intelligence as 
I was possessed of, directly and vividly: there had never 
been any sunshine, as regards language, in the earlier 
grey days of learning, for the sky had always pelted with 
gerunds and optatives. . . . With that illumination a 
great lig^* shone on English also: in the galloping race 
of composition at home I, at any rate, had much preferred 
to run than to read, but now I plunged headlong into 
the sea of English literature, reading fast, reading care- 
lessly, but reading rapturously. I bought the six-volume 
edition of Browning out of the money I won over school- 
fives, which should have been devoted to the purchase of 
a silver cup; a successful competition in rackets landed 
the works of Dickens, and in the hours when I should 
naturally have done mathematics and French and history, 
these shared with Juvenal and Aristophanes the honey of 
the flying minutes. Then came the need to imitate which 
always besets the budding author, and if you searched in 
the proper pages of The Marlburian you would surely 
disinter some specimens that aimed at Addison and 
stanzas which could never have found their printer, had 
there not been in my study a well-thumbed copy of 
Tennyson's early lyrics. 



THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 199 

There was another by-road for the literary pilgrim: 
four of us were joint editors, producers, and proprietors of 
that school paper. Who the two others were I have no 
idea; it is certain that Eustace and I wrote the greater 
part of it, and that, with some fine journalistic flair, he, 
and he alone, caused it to pour money into the pockets of 
its four editors. Domestically he knew something about 
printing and pulls and proofs, which had escaped the ex- 
perience of his friend and the family printing press, 
and that year The Marlburian, as I hope it is now, was 
a paying concern. Eustace interviewed an astonished 
tradesman, paid the printing bills, audited the accounts, 
and flowed back to his collaborators a Pactolus of large 
silver pieces. We wrote indignant letters signed "A 
Parent," and answered them with withering rejoinders 
signed "Another Parent" ; we invented abuses, and firmly 
denied them; we cut down the habitual drowsy accounts 
of house matches to the smallest paragraphs and spread 
a table of Socratic dialogue, proving that football was 
the same as cricket and that masters were the slaves of 
boys; or imagined that a hundred years hence a frag- 
ment of "The Princess" was dug up and edited and 
amended by Dry-as-Dust; or recommended the school 
generally, when a two-mile run was ordered by the foot- 
ball captain of their houses, to buy a hoop and bowl it 
along the road, in order to enliven the stupid act of 
purposeless running. In this latter point we set the 
example ourselves and bowled nice wooden hoops down 
the Bath road, thereby for some reason infuriating the 
staff of masters. Once, I remember, Eustace and I, 
going out for a run with our hoops, passed the open door 
of a class-room at an hour when the lower school was 
at work, on which a demented master sent out two junior 



200 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

boys with orders to capture the hoops and bring them 
in to him. Now, there was nothing immoral about hoops, 
nor was there any school rule that forbade their employ- 
ment, and so we went very briskly along down the Bath 
road for a mile or two, with two small boys in pursuit, 
and when they could run no longer we sat down on a gate. 
They panted up, and said they had been told to take 
away the hoops and bring them back to Mr. Sharpe, and 
so, very politely, we said, "Come and take them." 
Naturally they could make no serious attempt to take 
away the hoops of the head of the school and the captain 
of the Rugby fifteen, and so, after a little conversation, 
we all came back together. It was all very silly, but why 
did Mr. Sharpe send two small boys to take away the 
hoops of two big boys who happened to choose to bowl 
hoops ? We soon got tired of the habit, but it was great 
fun to write indignant letters to The Marlburian about 
hoops signed "Magister," and scathing replies signed 
"Discipulus." It made excellent selling stuff for the 
paper, and boys who had never dreamed of buying a 
Marlburian before put their threepence down with a 
spendthrift recklessness, because they knew that there was 
a correspondence about hoops, with plenty of "sarc" in 
it. There were real letters as well from dignified Old 
Marlburians, beginning "Has it come to this 1 ?" . . . 

To all these entrancing topics the editors gave their 
serious consideration. They herded together for con- 
sultation, and rejected each other's contributions with 
suave impartiality, and when they had settled what they 
wished to print, Eustace measured it, and usually said 
that there was too much. If it was all very precious a 
double number (price sixpence) was decreed; if not, a 
Socratic dialogue or some trifle of that kind was cut out. 



THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 201 

Three out of the four would be very complimentary to 
the baffled author, and assure him that they found his 
contribution most amusing, and if that did not soothe the 
rejection of it, they would grow more candid, and say 
it was beastly rot. When that was disposed of there 
might perhaps be a few inches of column to spare, and 
we inserted an advertisement that a sixth form boy was 
willing to exchange his hoop (nearly new) for a set of 
false teeth. Luckily someone remembered that a mathe- 
matical master had false teeth, and would be liable to 
think that this was "sarc" directed at' him, and some 
answers to non-existent correspondents were put in in- 
stead. By that time the cake would be finished and 
the teapot dry, and Eustace took the MSS. to the print- 
ers, and I went to conduct a rehearsal of Haydn's 
Symphony for the approaching Penny Reading, and ask 
Harry Irving what he was going to recite at it. 

These Penny Readings which took place once a term 
were an entirely delightful institution. Qui docebant 
jam docentur, as the Carmen told us, for the whole of this 
musical and dramatic entertainment was got up, rehearsed 
(to whatever stage of efficiency), conducted and per- 
formed by boys without any help from masters. There 
were piano solos, part-songs, vocal solos or duets, and 
perhaps some reading or representation, say, of the trial 
scene in Pickwick. But this year the Penny Readings in- 
cluded grim and finished recitations by Harry Irving, who 
"drew" in a manner so unprecedented, that instead of 
holding them in the "Bradleian," a hall of but moderate 
dimensions, Upper School itself, capable of holding the 
entire body of boys and masters, had to be requisitioned. 
It fell to my lot to conduct the musical part of the en- 
tertainment, and this year we audaciously rehearsed and 



202 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

performed Haydn's Toy Symphony, in which, for a spe- 
cial treat, we allowed Mr. Bambridge to play the cuckoo. 
There he sat, rapturously cheered as he mounted to the 
platform with his little wooden tube, lean and grave with 
a steady eye fixed on the conductor's baton. It had been 
arranged that the cuckoo, otherwise so obedient and punc- 
tual in its flutings, should at one point run amuck alto- 
gether, and go on saying "cuckoo" in spite of the efforts 
of the conductor to silence it. On it went till the roars 
of the audience entirely drowned its voice, and when 
silence was restored, it gave one more "cuckoo," pian- 
issimo prestissimo, just to show that it was quite unre- 
pentant. . . . But more than anything did Harry 
Irving's recitations bring down the house. In appear- 
ance he was his father, young and amazingly good-look- 
ing, and he had all the assurance and grip of a mature 
actor: he stalked and he paused, he yelled and he 
whispered, and he withered us with horror in some appall- 
ing little soliloquy by a dying hangman, round whose 
death-bed the ghosts of his victims most unpleasantly 
hovered. Then in the manner of a parson he gave us a 
short sermon on the moral lesson "to be drawn from, 
dear brethren, that exquisite gem of English poetry, 
'Mary had a little larm.' " 

The athletic ambitions of the first of these three terms 
was of course to win the football cup in house-ties, and 
also all the school matches. Neither quite came off, for 
the house was beaten in the final, while the school only 
made a moderate show in its foreign matches. But there 
was little time for moaning. Close on the heels of that 
disappointment came the Lent term with its fives, rackets 
and singing cups, and there was then no cause for any- 
thing but jubilation. At Easter came the dreadful fiasco 



THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 203 

of the Public School rackets in London, and following 
on that, the house was again knocked out in the final at 
cricket. Never shall I forget the heaviness of heart with 
which I came down that day from the cricket-field, due, 
not to the fact only of defeat — for even if we had won, 
that sense of finality would have been there — but because 
for me all the zeal and the struggle, with its failures and 
successes, of these entrancing school games, was over. 
Not again could games, so I dimly and correctly realized, 
have quite that absorbing and pellucid quality which dis- 
tinguished house matches: there was already forming 
in my mind, now that the last of these competitions 
was over, a certain dingy philosophy clouding the bright- 
ness, which recognized that games were amusements, to 
be taken as such. They might give exhilaration and en- 
joyment, but not again would they produce that unique 
absorption. I could not imagine again caring quite as 
much as I had cared during these last six years. Some 
hour had struck, and not alone for games, but for the 
multitudinous aims that had been bounded by the chapel 
wall on one side, the master's garden on another, the field 
where was the racket court and the football grounds in 
winter and the cricket pitches in summer, on the third and 
fourth sides. There was the angulus terra, which, apart 
from brief holidays, had constituted the whole of life for 
the vision of a boy. Apart from Addington, there was 
nothing in the whole round world that mattered like 
those few acres, and the glory which exuded out of their 
very soil. 

Dimly I conjectured that in a few months Marl- 
borough would be withdrawn into some bright starry 
orbit of its own, as far as I was concerned, revolving 
there with a sundered light in which I should no longer 



204 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

share, and that soon I should peer for it through the 
fog of the years that drifted across it. Some other orbit 
was to be mine, which, when I began to move in it, 
would no doubt have a heaven of its own to scour 
through, but as yet it had no significance for me ; it was 
dim and uncharted. Still incurably boyish, in spite of 
the nineteen years which were verging on the twentieth, 
I felt that I was being cast out of the only place that 
mattered. I suppose I knew in some dull logical way, 
that it was otherwise: that inexorable Time which sent 
me forth out of this mature infancy had something left 
in store, but to the eyes of nineteen, everyone who is 
thirty, at any rate, must clearly be a sere and yellow 
leaf, waiting for an autumnal blast to make an end of him 
in the fall of withered foliage. Life might be possible 
up to twenty-five or so, but then beyond doubt senility 
must be moribund and slobbering. "Thirty at least" was 
the verdict then: "Thirty at most" was so soon substi- 
tuted for it. For the first time in my life I had the 
definite sense of a book read through and loved from 
cover to cover, being closed, the sense of an "end," a 
finished period. Hitherto, change of home or the leav- 
ing of a private school had been not an "end" but a be- 
ginning: though one experience was finished the open- 
ing of a new one, of fresh places, fresh conditions had 
made the old just slip from the fingers of a careless hand, 
without sense of loss. But now my fingers clung desper- 
ately to what was slipping away: they did not clutch 
at that which was coming, but tightened, as the smooth 
days hurtled by, on that which they still just held. 

The last game that mattered "frightfully" had been 
already played, the last number of The Marlburian came 
out, and while one half of me would have chosen that 



THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 205 

the full moon of July should know no wane, the other 
would willingly have seen her turn to ashes, and fall like 
a cinder from the sky, to match the days from which 
the glow and the radiance were dying in the frost of the 
coming departure. Inanimate objects, beloved and 
familiar, like the row of lime trees in the court with the 
circular seats round them, my house study with the copies 
of Turner water-colours by my sister, the Alley and its 
noisy merry staircase, began to wear a strange aspect, for, 
so soon, they would have passed completely into other 
occupation. Drop by drop, like the sweet drippings from 
the limes, the honey was oozing from them, leaving 
empty cells and alien habitations. 

In especial there was a certain covered columned pas- 
sage, a paved and roofed pergola close to the sixth form 
class-room where so often I had waited for the advent of 
a friend. In stormy south-westerly weather the rain 
beat into it, but it was a good meeting-place, for the 
Alley, the Upper School, the sixth form room and the 
Bradleian made it a junction for passengers, and there 
was a board up with school-notices, promotions into the 
eleven and the fifteen and whatnot, to while away the 
waiting. A congregation of steps would come there as 
some form was released, but he was not there : then would 
come a few scattered steps, but not his. And then he 
would come round a corner, in a blustering hurry, and 
say, "Oh, sorry," and together we went up to the house- 
study madly alive, and sanely content. Those minutes 
of anticipation made the columned pergola more vivid 
than even the house-study or the Alley or the lime trees, 
and in so short a while it would all be dead, as a piece of 
scenery remaining on a stage, where others should play 
their friendly and wholesome parts. If I had had that 



206 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

which in the cant phrase is called "the corporate sense," 
I suppose the great thing would have been that genera- 
tions of others should do as I had done, and I should 
have said my grace, and got up thankfully from the 
delicate and vigorous feast. Instead I was Oliver and 
asked for more, and every year since I have wanted more 
of some quality that is inseparable from the wonder and 
sunset of boyhood. But now the sun was notched by 
the hills over which I must soon climb, where lay the 
untravelled country: its last rays were level over the 
plain, and before this last week of July was over, only 
high up on the peaks of memory away to the east would 
the rose linger. That, too, so I dismally supposed, would 
fade presently, but there I was wrong. It has never faded 
nor lost one atom of its radiance. 

There were rejoicings and jubilations to be gone 
through: the advent of Nellie for prize-giving, in which 
at last it was my lot to make several excursions to the 
table where morocco-bound books were stacked. There 
was a house-supper on the last day of all in celebration 
of the winning of those challenge cups, which was grati- 
fying also, but below that was the sound of the passing- 
bell. All that day it sounded, except just at the moment 
when I should have expected it to be most unbearably 
funereal. For the friend for whom I had so often waited 
in the colonnade came up with me to the cricket pavilion, 
from which I had to take away blazers and bat and 
cricketing paraphernalia, and having got them stuffed in- 
side my bag, we sat on the steep bank overlooking the 
field to wait for the first stroke of the chapel-bell. Other 
groups were straying about the grass, and some came and 
talked for a bit, and we wished they would go away, be- 
cause nobody else was wanted just then. It was not 



THE FALL OF THE FIRST LEAF 207 

that there was anything particular to say, for boys don't 
say much to one another, and we lay on the grass, and 
chewed the sweet ends of it, and when not silent, talked 
of perfectly trivial things. And at last the friend rolled 
over on to his face and said : 

"Oh, damn!" 

"Why?" I asked, knowing quite well. 

"Because it will be awful rot without you." 

"You'll soon find somebody else," said I. 

"Funny," said he. 

"Laugh then," said I. 

He sat up, nursing his knees in his arms, and looking 
down over the field. Just below was the stretch of grass 
where house football-ties were played in the winter, to 
the left was Beesly's house, and at the bottom of the 
field the racket court. Beyond and below across the 
road the chapel and the red school-buildings. Then his 
eyes came back from their excursion. 

"It's been ripping anyhow," he said. "Did two fel- 
lows ever have such a good time 1 ?" 

Quite suddenly at that, when the passing-bell should 
have been loudest, it ceased altogether. The whole of 
my dismal maunderings about days that were dead and 
years that were past, I knew to be utterly mistaken. 
Nothing that was worth having was dead or past at all : 
it was all here now, and all mine, a possession eternally 
alive. 

"But did they 4 ?" he repeated, as I did not answer. 

"Never. Nor will. And there's chapel-bell. Get 
up." 

He stood up and picked the grass seeds from his 
clothes. 



208 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

"Psalms this morning," he said telegraphically. 

"I know. 'Brethren and companions' sake.' Didn't 
think you had noticed." 

"Rather. Good old Psalm." 

I took up the cricket-bag, and he pulled at it to carry 
it. A handle came off. 

"Ass," said I. 

"Well, it was three-quarters off already," said he. 
"Come on; we shall be late. You can leave it at the 
porter's lodge." 

"Oh, may I, really? Thanks awfully," said I. 

"Sarc," said he. 

There was Beesly on the platform next day when I got 
to the station, and I remembered he had asked me what 
train I was going by. He just nodded to me, and con- 
tinued looking at volumes on the bookstall. But just as 
the whistle sounded, he came to the carriage door. 

"Just came to see you off," he said. "Don't forget us 
all." 



CHAPTER X 



CAMBRIDGE 



THE whole family went that summer holiday to the 
Lakes, where my father had taken the Rectory of 
Easedale, and in that not very commodious house five 
children, two parents and Beth all managed to shelter 
themselves from the everlasting rain that deluged those 
revolting regions. Had not steep muddy hills separated 
one lake from another, I verily believe that the Lakes 
must have become one sheet of mournful water with a 
few Pikes and Ghylls sticking up like Mount Ararat on 
another occasion that can scarcely have been more rainy. 
There was fishing to be had, but no fish: you might as 
well have fished in the rapids of Niagara as cast a fly on 
the streams, while the lakes themselves are noted for their 
depths of barren water. Out we used to go in mackin- 
toshes, and back we came in mackintoshes, and I cannot 
suppose that thirty years later the Rectory at Easedale 
can have lost its smell of wet india-rubber and drying 
homespuns. As a special contribution to the general dis- 
comfort Nellie discovered and developed a grand sort of 
ailment called "pleurodynia," which I suppose is the 
result of never being dry, and I capped that,by cultivating 
the most orange-coloured jaundice ever seen, and con- 
tinued being violently sick when you would have thought 
there was nothing to be sick with. 

But these atrocious tempests gave my father unlimited 

209 



210 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

scope for what his irreverent family called "The Cottar's 
Saturday Night." Best of all situations in the holidays 
he loved to have his entire family sitting close round him 
busy, silent and slightly unreal to their own sense, while 
he "did" his Cyprian. There he sat with his books and 
papers in front of him, at the end of a table in a smallish 
room, with all of us sitting there, each with his book, 
speaking very rarely and very quietly, so as not to dis- 
turb him, and everybody, alas, except him, slightly con- 
strained. In these holidays, Hugh, owing to inveterate 
idleness at Eton (where, beating me, he had got a scholar- 
ship), had a tutor to whom he paid only the very slightest 
attention, and on these evenings he would have some piece 
of Horace to prepare for next day, and would work at 
it for a little, and then drop his dictionary with a loud 
slap on the floor. Soon he would begin to fidget, and 
then catch sight of Arthur reading, and something in his 
expression would amuse him. He drew nearer him a 
piece of sermon paper which Nellie's pen was busy de- 
vouring on behalf of the next Saturday Magazine, and 
began making a caricature. At the same moment perhaps 
I would observe below lowered eyelids that Arthur was 
drawing me, and so I began to draw my mother, and 
Nellie catching the infection, began to draw Maggie. (If 
you gave her pulled-back hair and a tall forehead, the 
family would easily recognize it.) And then perhaps my 
father, pausing in his work, would see Hugh with his 
tongue protruding from the comer of his mouth (for that 
is the posture in which you can draw best) and say: 

"Dear boy, have you finished your preparation for 
to-morrow? What are you doing?" 

Hugh would allow he hadn't quite finished his prep- 
aration, not having begun it, and my father would look 



CAMBRIDGE 211 

at his drawing, and his mouth, the most beautiful that 
ever man had, would uncurl, until perhaps he threw back 
his head and laughed with that intense merriment that 
was so infectious. Possibly he might not be amused, and 
a little grave rebuke followed; he returned to his Cyprian 
and we all sat quiet again. But the criticism of the 
family was that this was "Papa's game, and he made the 
rules." For he, unable to get on with his Cyprian, or 
arriving at the end of a bit of work, would interrupt at 
will the mumness which was imposed on his behalf. But 
if Maggie or I finished what we were doing, we might not 
make general conversation. . . . And then the door 
would open, and Beth looked in, and said, "Eh, it's 
dressing-time," and her lovely old face would grow alight 
with love when she looked on my mother, her child of 
the elder family, and five more of her children of the sec- 
ond generation. From my father there would always be 
a delicious word of welcome for her, and he would say: 
"Beth, you're interrupting us all. Go away. Your 
watch is wrong." 

"Nay, sir, it isn't," said Beth — she always said "sir" 
to him, whatever his title was — "It's gone half-past 
seven." And she beamed and nodded, perfectly at ease 
in this solemn assembly. With her (who counted of 
course as one of it) there were eight in that little stuffy 
room, where we fidgeted and sat and read. And what 
would not I give, who with one other alone- survive from 
those evenings, to have an hour of them again, in that 
inconvenient proximity, surrounded by the huge love of 
a family so devoted and critical of each other, with the 
two amongst them whom nobody criticized, my mother 
with her spectacles on her forehead, and Beth looking in 
at the door? 



212 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

Then jaundice descended on me like the blur of a 
London fog, and through the depression of it, there 
seemed no ray that could penetrate. But my mother 
managed to effect that entry, as of course she always 
would, and she came back one dripping afternoon from 
Grasmere, with a packet in her hand. 

"As it's all so hopeless," she said, "I bought some lead 
soldiers. Oh, do let us have a battle." 

She poured a torrent of these metal warriors on to a 
table by my bed. There were cannons with springs that 
shot out peas, and battalions of infantry, and troops of 
cavalry. It was she, you must understand, who wanted 
to play soldiers, and to a jaundiced cynic of twenty that 
necessarily was quite irresistible. Who could have re- 
sisted a mother who asked you at her age to play soldiers'? 
We shot down regiments at a time, for when you enfilade 
a line of lead soldiers with a pea, if you hit the end 
man, he topples against the next one, and the next against 
the next, till there are none left standing. The peas flew 
about the room, rattled against washing-basins and tapped 
at the window-panes, and I felt much better. Then 
we bombarded Beth who came to know if I wouldn't like 
some dinner, and as I wouldn't, it was time to go to 
sleep. 

"A nice little bit of beef," began Beth. 

"If you say beef again, I shall be sick," said the invalid. 

"Nay, you won't," said Beth hopefully. 

Then to my mother : 

"Eh, dear, do go and dress," she said, "or you'll keep 
everybody waiting." 

My mother shot a final pea. 

"I won't be the conventional mother," she said, "and 
smooth your pillow for you. Nor will I peep in on tiptoe 



CAMBRIDGE 213 

after dinner to see if you're asleep. But, my darling, I 
know you'll be better to-morrow! Won't you?" 

King's College, Cambridge, whither my father ac- 
companied me in October, had, scarcely twenty years 
previously, become an open College; for centuries before 
that, it had been, as was originally the intention of the 
pious founder, Henry VI, a close monastic corporation 
consisting of Eton scholars destined for the priesthood. 
If a boy, say, at the age of twelve, won a scholarship at 
Eton, and was thus on the Royal Foundation there, it fol- 
lowed that unless he was supremely idle or vicious, he 
obtained in due rotation, without any further examina- 
tion, a King's scholarship, when he went up to the Uni- 
versity. After that, often while he was still an under- 
graduate, he became a fellow of King's, and for the rest 
of his life the bounty of Henry VI supplied him with 
commons, lodging, and an income of £200 a year pro- 
vided he did not marry, till he became a senior fellow, 
when his emolument was doubled. At the time of its 
foundation, the college was a regal and magnificent en- 
dowment for the encouragement of learning and the edu- 
cation of priests, but long before this Etonian sanctuary, 
consisting of fellows and scholars, was violated by the 
rude hordes of barbarians from other schools, the system 
had become one of those scandalous and glorious anachro- 
nisms, that take rank with such institutions as pocket- 
boroughs, where the local magnate could nominate his 
own friends to represent the views of the nation in Parlia- 
ment. 

The founder's idea had been that from year to year 
the band of scholars going up from Eton should keep 
the torch of learning alight, and grow old in celibate fine- 



214 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

ness and wisdom. No doubt there may have been some 
very minor Erasmuses thus trained and nurtured, and 
given stately leisure for the prosecution of their studies 
and the advancement of sound learning, but such a system 
was liable to many abuses, and as a matter of fact, acutely 
suffered from them. A Fellow of King's, thus supported 
for life by the bounty of the King, was under no compul- 
sion to study; he was perfectly at liberty to be lodged, 
boarded, and supplied with a pocket-money of £200 or 
£400 a year, without doing anything at all to earn it. 
Strange crabbed creatures were sometimes the result of 
this monastic indolence, for (as would have been the 
case in a monastery) there was no abbot or prior to allot 
tasks and duties to the fellows. Some, of course, did 
tutorial work among the scholars, but for the rest, who 
might or might not, according to their own inclination, 
work at Greek texts and scholia, there was no rule; and 
a man with no ambition in his work, meeting his fellows 
only once a day at the high table in Hall, if he chose 
to go there, and otherwise living alone might easily turn 
into a very odd sort of person. One of them, who died 
not so long before I went up, was never seen outside his 
rooms till dusk began to fall : then he would totter, stick 
in hand, out on to the great grass lawn in the court, and 
poke viciously at the worms, ejaculating to himself, "Ah, 
damn you, you haven't got me yet !" After this edifying 
excursion, he would go back to his rooms and be seen no 
more till dusk next day. All his life since the age of 
twelve or so, the bounty of Henry VI had supported him, 
and until the worms finally did "get" him, nothing could 
deprive him of his emoluments. How far short of the in- 
tention of the Royal Founder the college fell may be 
conjectured from the list of the fellows, which from first 



CAMBRIDGE 215 

to last contains no name of the slightest eminence or dis- 
tinction as a scholar, except that of the late Walter Head- 
lam, who was not an Etonian. 

The reconstruction of King's took place some years be- 
fore I went up, and no more of these life-fellows were 
appointed. Henceforth fellowships expired at the end 
(I think) of six years, though they could be prolonged if 
the holder was doing tutorial work in the college, or was 
engaged in such research as made it proper that his term 
should be extended. But such men as were already life- 
fellows were not shorn of their fellowships, and whether 
or no they were resident, whether or not they were en- 
gaged in any work which might, ever so faintly, be held 
to be congruous to the intention of the founder, they 
were still entitled for life to their income, their commons, 
and dinner, and if they chose to reside in the college to a 
set of fellows' rooms. At that time the college buildings 
would not nearly hold all the undergraduates, and fresh- 
men, unless they were scholars, must have lodgings out- 
side college; but in spite of this certain life-fellows still 
clung to their privileges, and continued to retain sets 
of rooms in Fellows' Buildings, which they never oc- 
cupied. One of these, engaged in wholly unscholastic 
work in London, used to come up for a week or two at 
the end of the Christmas term, but for the rest of the year 
his rooms stood vacant, while two others, who to the best 
of my knowledge never appeared in Cambridge at all, 
had another set of rooms, which were used merely as 
guest-rooms by other fellows. A fourth specimen of sur- 
vivals such as the founder never contemplated was 
ancient and dusky in appearance, and never left King's at 
all, though he took no part in the academic life of the 
place, appearing only in chapel and in Hall, and occupy- 



216 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

ing himself otherwise with making faint wailings on a 
violin. . . . But a friend of mine and I chanced on the 
discovery that if you whistled as he crossed the court to 
chapel, he stopped dead, and after a little pause, pro- 
ceeded cautiously again. A repetition of the whistle 
would make him retrace his steps, and it was possible 
by continuing to whistle, to drive him back to his rooms. 
This was extremely interesting, but the cause baffled con- 
jecture. Later on, however, after years of eremite seclu- 
sion, he suddenly burst into activity, like a volcano long 
believed to be extinct, gave tea-parties in his rooms with 
a leg of cold mutton on the sideboard and a table laid 
as for dinner, and was induced to play the violin at col- 
lege concerts. Then (Ossa piled on Pelion for wonder) 
he married a girl in the Salvation Army, and disappeared 
from these haunts of celibacy. Again I cannot imagine 
that the founder contemplated that the head of the col- 
lege should resemble our Provost, for Dr. Okes, though 
resident, was approaching or had already reached his 
ninetieth year, and inhabited in complete seclusion the 
Provost's Lodge. I am sure I never set eyes on him at 
all; he took no part whatever in college business, as in- 
deed his advanced years prevented him from doing, but 
there he had lingered on from year to year without a single 
thought of resignation entering his venerable head. 
Though totally past work, he was Provost of King's and 
Provost of King's he remained, a drone apparently im- 
perishable. 

Others, however, of these life-fellows justified them- 
selves by a busy existence; there was the Vice-Provost, 
Augustus Austen Leigh, who performed all the presiden- 
tial duties of the Provost; there was Mr. J. E. Nixon, 
Dean of the college, lecturer on Latin prose to under- 



CAMBRIDGE 217 

graduates, and Professoi of Rhetoric at Gresham Col- 
lege, London, who surely made up for these drones who 
abused the bounty of the founder, by his prodigious ac- 
tivities. In appearance he was the oddest of mortals, a 
little over five feet tall, wearing always, even when he 
went down to play lawn-tennis in the Fellows' Garden, 
a black tail-coat, and boots of immense length, of which 
the toes pointed sharply upwards. He had only one 
hand, and that the left; his right hand was artificial, 
covered with a tight black kid glove. He had also only 
one eye and that the right, but the other was marvellously 
sharp. He made a tennis-ball to nestle in the crook of 
his arm, and then by a dexterous jerk of his body flung 
it into the air and severely served it. 

His mind was like a cage-full of monkeys, all intent on 
some delirious and unintelligible business. "Show me a 
man with a green nose," he once passionately exclaimed, 
"and I'll believe in ghosts." He had a voice as curious as 
his boots, in range a tenor, in quality like the beating of 
a wooden hammer on cracked metal plates, and every 
week he held a glee-singing meeting after Hall in his 
rooms, and refreshed his choir with Tintara wine, hot tea- 
cakes, and Borneo cigars. We sang catches and rounds 
and madrigals, he beating time with a paper-knife, which, 
as he got shriller and more excited, would slip from his 
hand and fly with prodigious velocity across the room. 
He always took the part of first tenor, and whoever gave 
the key on the piano put it up a tone or two, in order to 
hear Nixon bark and yelp at some preposterous C. If 
it was obviously out of range he would say (running all 
his words into each other like impressions on blotting 
paper} : "Surely thatsratherhighisthatonly A?" .... Then 
the unaccountable mistake was discovered and we started 



218 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

again. Where he found all these rounds and catches I 
cannot conjecture: much music, certainly, that I have 
heard in Nixon's room has never reached my ears again, 
nor have I ever seen anyone, except those who attended 
these meetings, who was acquainted with the following 
catch. It started Lento, and, under the strokes of the 
paper-knife quickened up to andante and allegro, and 
ended prestissimo possibile. The words ran thus, start- 
ing with a first tenor lead : 



i i=> 



Mr. Speaker, though 'tis late, 

I must lengthen the debate, 

The debate. 

Pray support the chair! 

Pray support the chair! 

Mr. Speaker, though 'tis late, 

I must lengthen the debate. 

Question! question! Order! order! 

Hear him ! Hear him ! Hear him ! Hear ! 

(Da capo: da capo: da capo.) 

Every moment it got quicker, the barks and yells over 
"Order! Order!" grew louder and louder, until the 
whole kennel was a yelp, and when everyone was quite 
exhausted, and the pandemonium no longer tolerable, 
Nixon brought down the paper-knife (if it had not flown 
out of his hand) with a loud bang on the table and wiped 
his face and laughed for pleasure. Then he poured out 
Tintara wine, and gave us Borneo cigars, while he 
tumbled an avalanche of music out of a bookcase and 
tried to find "I loved thee beautiful and kind." 

Apart from glee-singing, lawn-tennis and Latin prose, 
his mind chiefly ran on argument and on what he called 
"starting a hare." He would advance some amazing 






J 






"her grace" (a domestic caricature) 






[Page 219 



nn 



CAMBRIDGE 221 

proposition, such as "Why shouldn't we all — no, that 
wouldn't do, but why not play lawn-tennis and sing glees 
in the morning, and work in the evening*?" He argued 
about the most casual topic : if you said, "It's a fine day," 
he cleared his throat raspingly, and dropped something 
he was carrying, and said, "It all depends on what you 
mean by fine. If you mean sun and blue sky, granted; 
but why shouldn't you call it fine if there are buckets of 
rain? It all depends what you mean by 'fine.' A fish 
now " 

"I meant an ordinary fine day," began his bewildered 
guest. 

"Very well: but I say 'fish.' I'm a fish and you're a 
fish. To a fish probably the wetter it is, the finer it is, 
and there you are." 

There you were : long before anybody else Nixon had 
invented the art of preposterous conversation, which Mr. 
Hichens wrongly attributes to Oscar Wilde. To Nixon 
it was not only an art, a product of instinct, but a. science, 
a product of definite reasoning. He would not change 
the subject, when his argument had been burnt to ashes 
(c "ten by himself), but would confidently blow on the 
c .ders, expecting some unconjecturable Phoenix to arise 
fiom them. 

By far the most notable of the life-fellows was Oscar 
Browning, without mention of whom no adequate idea 
of Cambridge life in the late eighties and early nineties 
can possibly be arrived at. Though King's was in large 
measure a college quite apart from the rest of the Uni- 
versity, giving itself (so said the rest of the University) 
unwarrantable airs, Oscar Browning (whom it is simpler 
to designate as O.B. for he was never known otherwise) 
pervaded not King's only, but the whole of Cambridge, 



222 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

with his pungent personality. His was a perennial and 
rotund youthfulness, a love of loyal adventure not really 
challenged by the most devout of his competitors, for 
who except O.B. at the age of forty-five or so, ever bought 
a hockey-stick, and imperilled a majestic frame in order 
to have the pleasure of being hit on the shins by the Duke 
of Clarence, then an undergraduate at Trinity, and heir- 
presumptive to the English throne? I was still a junior 
at Marlborough when these Homeric events happened, 
but years afterwards, O.B. was still talking about the 
"awfully jolly" games of hockey he had with Prince 
Eddy. . . . Even the fact of his playing hockey at all, 
which he certainly did, affords a key to the intensity of 
his activities. 

He rode a tricycle, and once, accompanying him on a 
bicycle with funereal pedallings, while he discoursed of 
Turkish baths and Grand Dukes, and Taormina and Eng- 
lish history, I observed that he stuck fast in a muddy 
place, and prepared to dismount, in order to shove him 
out of it. But he obligingly told me to do nothing of 
the kind, for some casual youth was on the path beside 
his enmired tricycle to whom he said : 

"Charlie, old boy, give me a shove. Ha! Ha! 

"Charlie old boy," with his face a-shine with smiles, 
gave the required push, and O.B. rejoined me, as I 
swooped and swerved along the road in order to go very 
slowly. 

"Charlie is my gyp's son," he said. "Such a jolly boy. 
Thanks awfully, Charlie. Well, there I was, when the 
Grand Duke's yacht came into Taormina. And, by the 
way, do you know the Maloja 4 ? The Crown-Princess of 
Germany came there one year when I was in the hotel, so 
I dressed myself like a Roman proconsul, in a white toga 



CAMBRIDGE 223 

of bath towels, ha, ha, and — and — really these ruts are 
most annoying — and a laurel wreath, and went out to 
meet her Royal Highness. I had a retinue of four young 
men who were staying at the hotel as lictors, with axes 
and sticks, and I read a short address to her to welcome 
her, and we had lunch together, and played lawn-tennis 
and it was all awfully jolly and friendly and unconven- 
tional. Why aren't we all natural, instead of being 
afraid of poor Mrs. Grundy, whose husband surely died 
so long ago? She has never married again, which shows 
she must be a most unpopular female. Most females, I 
notice, are so unpopular: they never know when they're 
wanted, and their hearts are always bigger than their 
heads. Not of course your dear mother — those charming 
Lambeth garden parties — and dear Lady Salisbury. I 
saw the Queen when I was at Balmoral last year — my 
bootlace has come undone, so careless of Charlie not to 
notice it — and how hopelessly benighted is Cambridge al- 
together ! Lord Acton came to stay with me the other day 
— I think my tricycle wants oiling — and dined with me 
at the High Table. Nixon was sitting on his other side, 
propounding conundrums about bed-makers, and hoping 
that he would sing glees with him. Ha ! Ha ! Every boy 
ought to realize his youth, instead of wasting his energies 
over elegiacs. When the Grand Duke came into Taor- 

mina " 

It is really impossible to render the variety of O.B.'s 
general conversation, of which the foregoing is but a dim 
reproduction. His performances, too (the expression of 
himself in deeds), were just as various, and yet everyone 
in Cambridge was aware that behind this garish behaviour 
there was a real, a forcible and a big personality. His 
performances chiefly expressed themselves in tricyclings 



224 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

and bathings, in lectures on English history, which no- 
body attended, and in At-Homes on Sunday evening, 
which everybody attended. He had a set of four rooms 
(the first being a bathroom) which were all thrown open 
to anybody, and if you had said you wanted a bath in 
the middle of the party, O.B. would certainly have said, 
"Ha, ha! awfully jolly," have given you a sponge and a 
towel and have come in to help. Next to that came his 
bedroom, lined with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, 
with a bronze reproduction of the Greek "Winged Sleep" 
over his bed; then, not a whit more public than these 
apartments came two big sitting-rooms, in one of which 
was a grand piano, and four small harmoniums of various 
tones, one flute-like, one more brazen in quality, and two 
faintly resembling wheezy and unripe violins. On these 
— each with its performer and a miniature score — O.B. 
and Bobby, and Dicky and Tommy would execute some 
deliberate quartette, or with the piano to keep them all 
moderately together would plunge with gay, foolhardy 
courage into the Schumann quintette. Never was there 
a more incredible sight (you could hardly believe you 
saw it) than that of O.B. pedalling away at this Obeo- 
phone (for thus this curious harmonium was aptly 
named) with his great body swaying to and fro and 
strange crooning sounds coming out of his classical mouth 
to reinforce the flutings of his melody, while Bobby and 
Dicky and Tommy, nimble-fingered members of the Cam- 
bridge Musical Society, sat with brows corrugated by 
their anxiety to keep in time with O.B. They never 
learned that they were attempting an impossibility, but 
followed him faint yet pursuing as he galloped along a 
few bars ahead, or suddenly slowed down so that they 
shot in front of him. At the conclusion he would pat 



CAMBRIDGE 225 

them all on the back, and say, "Awfully jolly Brahms is, 
or was it Beethoven?" and proceed to sing, "Funiculi, 
funicula" himself. . . . Groups formed and reformed; 
here would be a couple of members of the secret and 
thoughtful society known as "The Apostles" with white 
careworn faces, nibbling biscuits and probably discussing 
the ethical limits of Determinism; there the President of 
the Union playing noughts and crosses with a Cricket 
Blue; there an assembly of daring young men who tore 
their gowns, and took the board out of their caps, in order 
to present a more libertine and Bohemian appearance, 
when they conversed with the young lady in the tobaccon- 
ist's. Dons from King's or other colleges fluttered in and 
out like moths, and the room grew ever thicker with the 
smoke of innumerable cigarettes. But O.B., however 
mixed and incongruous was the gathering, never lost his 
own hospitable identity in the crowd; waving bottles of 
curious hock he would spur on the pianist to fresh deeds 
of violence, making some contribution to the discussion 
on Determinism, and promise to speak at the next debate 
at the Union, as he wandered from room to room, bald 
and stout and short yet imperial with his huge Neronian 
head, and his endless capacity for adolescent enjoyment. 
Age could not wither him any more than Cleopatra; he 
was a great joyous ridiculous Pagan, with a genius for 
geniality, remarkable generosity and kindliness, a good- 
humoured contempt for his enemies, of whom he had 
cohorts, a first-rate intellect and memory, and about as 
much stability of purpose as a starling. His extraordi- 
nary vitality, his serene imperviousness to hostility, his 
abandoned youthfulness were the ingredients which made 
him perennially explosive. Everyone laughed at him, 
many disapproved of him, but for years he serenely re- 



226 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

mained the most outstanding and prominent personality 
in Cambridge. Had he had a little more wisdom to 
leaven the dough of his colossal cleverness, a little more 
principled belief to give ballast to his f riskiness, he would 
have been as essentially great as he was superficially gro- 
tesque. 

A small college as King's then was, splits up into far 
more sharply defined cliques than a large one, and it 
was not long before I found myself firmly attached to a 
small group consisting in the main of Etonians belonging 
either to King's or Trinity. The younger fellows of the 
college mixed very democratically with undergraduates 
of all years, and the head of this vivid group was cer- 
tainly Monty James, subsequently Provost of King's and 
now Provost of Eton. Walter Headlam, perhaps the 
finest Greek scholar that Cambridge has ever produced, 
and Lionel Ford, now headmaster of Harrow, both of 
them having lately taken their degrees, were of the com- 
pany, so too were Arthur Goodhart, then working for a 
degree in music, and a little later among junior members 
R. Carr Bosanquet, now Professor at Liverpool. We 
were all members of the Pitt Club, that delightful and 
unique institution where, to the end of your life, once 
being a life-member, your letters are stamped without any 
payment, and most of us were, or soon became, members 
of a literary society called "The Chitchat," in which on 
Saturday night each in rotation entertained the society at 
his rooms with an original paper on any subject as in- 
tellectual fare, and with coffee and claret-cup, anchovy 
toast, and snuff, handed solemnly round in a silver box, 
for physical stimulus. Sometimes if the snuff went 
round too early, awful reverberations of sneezing from 
the unaccustomed punctuated the intellectual fare, and 



CAMBRIDGE 227 

I remember (still with pain) reading a paper on Mar- 
lowe's Faustus, during which embarrassing explosions 
unnerved me. I had reason to quote (at a very impressive 
stage of this essay) certain lines from that tragedy, which 
with stage directions came out as follows : 

Faustus. Where are you damned? {Sneezings.) 

Mephistopheles. In Hell. {Sneezings and loud laughter.) 

For where I am is Hell {Sneezing and more 

laughter), 
And where Hell is ( Uproar) there must I ever 
be. 

On another occasion a prominent philologist whose 
turn it was to regale us, found that he had not had leisure 
to write his paper on "Manners" and proposed to address 
us on the subject instead. He strode about the room 
gesticulating and vehement, stumbling over the hearth- 
rug, lighting cigarettes and throwing them away instead 
of his match, while he harangued us on this interesting 
ethical topic, with interspersed phrases of French and 
German, and odd English words like "cocksuredom." As 
this ludicrously proceeded, a rather tense silence settled 
down on "The Chitchat"; its decorous members bit their 
lips, and prudently refrained from looking each other in 
the face, and there were little stifled noises like hiccups or 
birds in bushes going about the room, and the sofa where 
three sat trembled, as when a kettle is on the boil. Then 
he diverged, via, I think, the exquisite urbanity of the 
ancient Greeks, to Greek sculpture, and proceeded as a 
practical illustration to throw himself into the attitude of 
Discobolus. At that precise moment, Dr. Cunningham 
of Trinity, who was drinking claret-cup and trembling a 
great deal, completely lost control of himself. Claret- 



228 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

cup spurted from his nose and mouth; I should not have 
thought a man could have so violently choked and 
laughed simultaneously, without fatal damage to himself. 
That explosion, of course, instantaneously spread round 
the entire company, except the amazed lecturer, and Dr. 
Cunningham, finding he could not stop laughing at all, 
seized his cap and gown and left the room with a rapid 
and unsteady step. Even when he had gone wild yells 
and slappings of the leg came resonantly in through the 
open windows as he crossed the court. . . . 

But the Love-feast of the Clan was on Sunday evening, 
when in rotation, they dined in each other's rooms. This 
institution (known as the "T.A.F." or "Twice a Fort- 
night") had been inaugurated by Jim Stephen, that bril- 
liant and erratic genius, then in London, editing The 
Mirror and astounding the Savile Club, who a year or two 
later returned to Cambridge again, and, until his final and 
melancholy eclipse, diffused over everyone who came 
across him the beam of his intellect and personality. Of 
him I shall speak later: at present the clan of friends met, 
so to speak, under the informal hegemony of Monty 
James. Intellectually (or perhaps aesthetically) I, like 
many others, made an unconditional surrender to his 
tastes, and, with a strong prepossession already in that 
direction, I became convinced for the time — and the time 
was long — that Dickens was the St. Peter who held the 
keys of the heavenly kingdom of literature. When din- 
ner at the T.A.F. was over, Monty James might be in- 
duced to read about the birthday-party of the Kenwigses, 
with a cigarette sticking to his upper lip, where it bobbed 
up and down to his articulation, until a shout of laughter 
on the reader's part over Mr. Lillyvick's glass of grog, 
cast it forth on to the hearth-rug. He almost made me 



CAMBRIDGE 229 

dethrone Bach from his legitimate seat, and by a revolu- 
tionary movement place Handel there instead, so magnifi- 
cent were the effects produced, when with him playing 
the bass, and me the treble from a pianoforte arrange- 
ment for two hands, we thundered forth the "Occasional 
Overture." He was a superb mimic, and at the T.A.F. 
and elsewhere a most remarkable saga came to birth, in 
which the more ridiculous of the Dons became more ridicu- 
lous yet. And when on these Sunday evenings the Dick- 
ens reading, and the "Occasional Overture," and some 
singing and Saga were done, a section of the T.A.F. would 
go to O.B.'s "at home," and mingle with inferior mortals. 

Another society common to many members of the 
T.A.F. was the Decemviri Debating Society. To this, 
some time during my undergraduate days, I was elected, 
though I do not think I ever expressed any wish to be- 
long to it, for when it came to making a speech, terror, 
then as now, invariably deprived me of coherent utter- 
ance, and a rich silence was all that I felt capable of con- 
tributing to these discussions. Knowing this I never at- 
tended any meeting at all, and as a rule of the society was 
that if any member absented himself for a term (or was 
it two*?) from the debates, he should be deprived of the 
privileges of membership, I received one day a notice of 
the next debate, at which there was private business to 
be transacted in the matter of my own expulsion. Un- 
justifiable indignation, for this time only, put terror to 
flight, and I was allowed to open another debate in the 
place of that already arranged for, and to make a speech 
to show reason why I should not be expelled. My 
motion was triumphantly carried, and I never went to a 
meeting of the Decemviri again. 

I suppose it must have been that belated year of volun- 



230 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

tary reading at Marlborough, which enabled me to win 
an exhibition at King's at the end of my first term; 
after that for a year and a half I was utterly devoid of 
all interest in classical subjects. There was not the small- 
est spur to industry or appreciation provided by tutors or 
lecturers : if you attended lectures and were duly marked 
off as present, you had conformed to the rite, but nothing 
you heard could conceivably stimulate your zeal. The 
classical tutor under whose academic frigidity we fol- 
lowed Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War 
stood on a dais at the end of the lecture room, and in- 
decently denuded his subject of any appeal to interest. 
He put his head on one side and said, "Then came Sphac- 
teria: I don't know what Sphodrias was about," and so 

nobody knew what either Sphodrias or Mr. X was 

about. He looked over exercises in Greek prose as well : 
on one occasion I was fortunate enough to drag in a 
quantity of tags from Plato and Thucydides, and re- 
ceived, for the only time, his warm approval. A piece of 
Greek prose, according to academic standards, appeared 
to be good, in proportion as it "brought in" quotations 
and phrases plucked from Thucydides or Plato; Baboo 
English was its equivalent in more modern tongues. Tags 
and unusual words and crabbed constructions from the 
most obscure passages were supposed to constitute good 
Greek prose, just as in the mind of a Bombay or Calcutta 
student, the memoir of Onoocool Chunder Mookerjee 
represented an example of dignified English. To quote 
from that immortal and neglected work, "Having said 
these words, he hermetically sealed his lips never to open 
them again. He became sot to voce for a few hours, and 
he went to God about 6 p.m." As this sublime death- 
bed scene appears to the ordinary Englishman, so would 



CAMBRIDGE 231 

the prose which Mr. X approved have appeared to 

the ordinary Greek of the time of Pericles. . . . But he 
had been Senior Classic, and carried on the wonderful 
tradition, and in other respects was classical tutor and 
an eager but inefficient whist-player. Nixon, an equally 
traditional Latin scholar, trained us to produce a similar 
Latinity, and we got Monty James to imitate them both. 
Any dawning of love for classical language receded, as 
far as I was concerned, into murk midnight again, and 
having temporarily justified my existence by winning an 
exhibition, I deliberately proceeded for the next year 
and a half to follow more attractive studies. A year's 
hard work on the approved Baboo lines, I calculated, 
would be sufficient to secure success in the Classical 
Tripos, which was the next event of any importance. 

Young gentlemen with literary aspirations usually 
start a new University magazine, which for wit and 
pungency is designed to eclipse all such previous efforts, 
ancl I was no exception in the matter of this popular 
gambit. Another freshman lodging in the same house as 
myself was joint-editor, and so was Mr. Roger Fry, two 
or three years our senior, and some B.A. whose name I 
cannot recollect. Mr. Roger Fry certainly drew the il- 
lustration on the cover of the Cambridge Fortnightly, 
which represented a tremendous sun of culture rising be- 
hind King's College Chapel. O.B. contributed a poem to 
it, so also did my brother Arthur, and Mr. Barry Pain 
sent us one of the best parodies in the language, called 
"The Poets at Tea," in which Wordsworth, Tennyson, 
Christina Rossetti, Swinburne and others are ludicrously 
characteristic of themselves. He also tried to galvanize 
the Cambridge Fortnightly into life by one or more ad- 
mirable short stories, and Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson ap- 



232 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

plied the battery with him. But the unfortunate infant 
was clearly stillborn, and considering the extreme feeble- 
ness of most of its organs, I do not wonder that it was, 
after the lapse of a term or so, quite despaired of. It had 
really never lived : it had merely appeared. My share in 
the funeral expenses was about five pounds, and I was 
already too busy writing Sketches from Marlborough, 
which was duly and magnificently published within a 
year, to regret the loss. Fearing to be told that I had 
better attend to my Greek and Latin, I did not inform 
my father of this literary adventure; then, when a local 
printer and publisher at Marlborough, to my great glee, 
undertook its production, I thought he would consider it 
very odd that I had not told him of it before and so I 
did not tell him at all. The book had a certain local 
notoriety, and naturally enough, the fact of it reached 
him, and he wrote me the most loving letter of remon- 
strance at my having kept it from him. There was no 
word of blame for this amateur expenditure of time and 
energies, but I divined and infinitely regretted that I had 
hurt him. And somehow I could not explain, for I still 
felt that if he had known I was working at it, he cer- 
tainly would have suggested that I might have been better 
occupied. Already, though half-unconsciously, I knew to 
what entrancing occupation I had really determined to 
devote my life, and though I might have made a better 
choice, I could not, my choice being really made, have 
been better occupied than in practising for it. The book 
in itself, for the mere lightness which was all that it 
professed, was not really very bad: the ominous part 
about it (of which the omens have been amply fulfilled) 
being the extreme facility with which it was produced. 



CAMBRIDGE 233 

Of all the temples in the world, built by the wisdom 
of cunning artificers, and consecrated by the love of rever- 
ent hearts, none can surpass and few can equal the glory 
of that holy and beautiful house which the founder of 
King's decreed for the worship of God, with its jewelled 
windows and the fan-vaulting of its incomparable roof. 
Half-way up, separating choir from nave, is the tall oak 
screen stretching from side to side, on which stands the 
organ, a "huge house of sounds" with walls of gilded 
pipes, and, at the corners, turrets where gold angels with 
trumpets to their mouths have alighted. The nave on 
Sunday afternoons in the short days of winter would be 
nearly dark, but for the soft glow of the innumerable wax 
candles with which the choir was lit, flowing over the 
organ screen. At half-past three, the hour of those Sun- 
day afternoon services, there would still be a little light 
outside, though that would have faded altogether be- 
fore service was over, and just opposite where I sat was 
the window that I love best in all the world. The Saviour 
has risen on Easter morning, and before him in dress of 
sapphire and crimson Mary Magdalene is kneeling. She 
had been weeping and had heard behind her the question, 
"Woman, why weepest thou 1 ?" Her bereaved heart had 
answered, and he whom she supposed to be the gardener 
had said, "Mary." It was then, in that window, that she 
knew him, and turning, she bowed herself to the ground, 
with one hand stretched out to him, and said, "Rabboni !" 
In the garden of the Resurrection He stood, with the 
flowers of the spring about His feet, instead of the spike- 
nard, very precious, with which she had anointed them for 
his burial. . . . During the Psalms for the twenty- 
seventh evening of the month, when she who sowed in 
tears reaped in joy, the window would grow dark against 



234 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

the faded light outside, and the wise and tranquil candle- 
light spread like a luminous fog to the cells of the vault- 
ing above. At the end of the service, the red curtain 
across the arch in the screen was drawn back, and you 
peered into the dusk of the nave, and the dark of the 
night. . . . 

Or else on week-days a consultation of the musical bill 
of fare on the chapel door would bring you, a little before 
anthem time, into the nave, for Wesley's "Wilderness" 
was soon to be sung. The choir, when service was going 
on, was behind the screen and the crimson curtain, but 
the candle-light there, aided by a few sconces here, made 
visible the roof, and the black silhouettes of the trumpet- 
ing angels on the organ. Then the solo bass began: 
there was the fugue of the waters breaking out, and the 
treble solo and chorus of the flight of Sorrow and sighing. 
Perhaps you waited for the conclusion of inaudible 
prayers, on the chance that Dr. Mann would play a Bach- 
fugue at the end, after the crimson curtain had been 
drawn back and the white choir had gone into its vestries. 
There was this reward, let us say, that afternoon, for the 
gamba on the swell started the melodious discussion, and 
its soliloquy provoked an answer in the same words but 
with another voice. The duet "thickened and broad- 
ened," fresh voices joined; they found a second theme, 
and gradually step by step, the whole organ, but for one 
keyboard, silent as yet, took up the jubilant wrangling. 
What the gamba had stated, the diapason now pro- 
claimed: what the diapason had shouted was thundered 
from the pedals. And then the last keyboard was in use, 
for what but the Tubas could so have imposed themselves 
and penetrated that immense and melodious rioting of 
sound? Perhaps the golden angels at the four corners 



CAMBRIDGE 235 

of the organ, "opened their mouths and drew in their 
breath," and spoke through their celestial trumpets. 

It is impossible to disentangle and reduce to chronology 
the infinity of interests that interweaved themselves with 
these three undergraduate years, and the reader must 
sympathetically partake of a macedoine of memories, that 
were the ingredients in the enthralling dish. Outside 
Cambridge, which daily became more absorbing, I had 
the emotional experience of seeing Miss Mary Anderson 
double the part of Hermione and Perdita in The 
Winter s Tale, and fell violently in love with her. Never 
surely was there so beautiful a Shakespearian heroine, 
never did another actress make such music of the tale of 
the flowers she had gathered. No sculptor's skill or 
whiteness of Pentelic marble ever approached the glory 
of that queenly figure, and with what amazement of joy 
I saw it stir and cease to be a statue when, with a waving 
of lovely arms, that sent up a cloud of powder, there was 
no statue any more but the queen, living and moving 
again. I bought a photograph of her, carried it about 
with me by day, and by night put it on a table by my 
bed, fearing all the time that my father would discover 
it, for he would not have cared much about this ex- 
perience of mine. Not for nearly thirty years later did I 
meet my Hermione in the flesh and lay my belated hom- 
age before her. 

Marlborough also was a lodestar, appearing already, 
as must needs be, of lesser magnitude, now that new con- 
stellations directed my voyagings, but, being granted an 
exeat of two nights in order to witness the opening of 
Truro Cathedral, I spent both in the train in order to get 
half a day at my school. Already the old order had 



236 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

changed; the values were different, and even as I had 
once suspected, a few months had sufficed to do that. 
Yet the other aspect was true also; I had absorbed and 
assimilated something from the Wiltshire upland which 
was imperishably part of my personality : my very iden- 
tity would have been something other than it was, had 
I not lived and grown up there. But many ties which 
had seemed close had drooped and loosened, and now I 
saw which were the closest of all, and they, just one or 
two of them, were as taut as ever; that of Beesly, still 
merry-eyed behind the pince-nez to which he had taken, 
and that of the friend who on the last day of term had 
sat with me in the field waiting for chapel-bell. He 
absented himself from an hour of morning-school, and 
met me, dishevelled with a night journey, at the station. 
As we passed through the town we bought rolls and 
sausages, and while I had a bath, he came in and out, 
making breakfast ready in the study that had been mine, 
and for that hour it was as if the rind of the last months 
had been peeled off, and the old friendship glowed like 
the heart of the fruit. Otherwise, the little impression 
I had made on that shining shore was already washed by 
the advancing tide, and its edges were blunt, while, a 
little higher up the beach, the sand-castles of others were 
growing tall and turreted under vigorous spades. . . . 



CHAPTER XI 



THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN 



EVEN away from Cair bridge, which in those under- 
graduate years was necessarily the hot hub of the 
universe, life remained as highly coloured as at the time 
when Lambeth and Addington first flung open their ador- 
able pasturages. It was thrilling to know that Robert 
Browning was coming to dinner one night, to be grasped 
by the hearty hand that had written the poems of which a 
fives competition had procured me a copy. There was 
but a small party on the night that I remember, and after 
dinner my father moved up to take the place next him, 
and beckoned to me to close up on the other side. Some- 
how a mention came of a volume of Austin Dobson's, and 
Robert Browning preserved a cheerful silence till some 
direct question was put to him. Then, drinking off his 
port, he made a notable phrase. 

"Well, some people like carved cherry-stones," he said. 

I fancy he always avoided talking of his own works, 
and that my father knew this, for certainly no allusion 
was made to them. But, as we rose, he volunteered a 
question to my father, saying, "What of my work do 
you like best?" On which my father replied: 

"Your lyrics." 

Robert Browning gave some great gesticulation; he 
seems to me now to have rubbed his hands, or jumped or 
stamped a foot. 

237 



238 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

"Lyrics'?" he said. "I have deskfuls of them." 

In consequence, I still faintly hope that some day there 
may be discovered a great ream of lyrics by Robert 
Browning, for, as far as I know, "deskfuls" have not yet 
appeared. 

On another occasion Tennyson was there. Of his con- 
versation I have no sort of recollection, the reason for 
which lapse may be probably accounted for by the fact 
that he didn't say anything. But I had picked his note 
of acceptance out of my mother's waste-paper basket and 
the envelope signed in the bottom left-hand corner, both 
torn across, so he could not leave me comfortless. 

How very odd these dinner-parties, great or small, 
would have appeared at the present day! There was 
but one circulation of wine after the ladies had rustled 
forth, and even when they had gone, there was nothing 
in the shape of tobacco, which, combined with the indo- 
lent progression of the decanter, surely accounted for 
the austerity of Tennyson. A long sitting of abstemious 
gentlemen was succeeded by a short sitting in the draw- 
ing-room, and then the bell sounded at ten, and the whole 
company trooped into the chapel for a slightly ab- 
breviated evensong. Sometimes, this service was before 
dinner; otherwise, at its conclusion, round about half- 
past ten, the guests departed, for after this long de- 
votional interlude, it was frankly impossible to resume a 
festive sociability. Already the cigarette-habit had made 
its footing in most houses, to the extent, anyhow, of a 
guest, if so decadently inclined, having opportunity of in- 
dulging his lust, but neither at Lambeth nor at Adding- 
ton was there any parleying with the enemy. My father 
intensely disliked the smell of tobacco, and once only 
when the present King, as Duke of York, dined at Lam- 



THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN 239 

beth, was an after-dinner cigarette allowed. On that oc- 
casion I, greatly daring, told my father that he liked a 
cigarette after dinner (so it was popularly supposed), and 
for the first time, the gallery of portraits was veiled be- 
hind the unusual incense. There were many great stern 
houses in the eighties, which kept the flag of no surrender 
flying in the dining-room, but I doubt if any except my 
father's held out till after the middle of the nineties. He 
knew of but ignored the existence of a smoking-room at 
Lambeth and Addington, but neither in drawing-room or 
dining-room, nor until the hour of bedroom candles (elec- 
tric lighting being still an exceptional illumination) was 
there the chance of a cigarette. 

A story, ben trovato, it may be, was told in this re- 
gard, as to how, when a Pan-Anglican conference was in 
progress at Lambeth and the whole house was buzzing 
with bishops, my father had occasion late one night to 
visit the bedroom of one of the prelates, with some paper 
of agenda for next day: He got no answer to his tap 
on the door, and entered, to find the occupant on his knees 
before the fire-place. My father, supposing that he was 
at his private devotions silently withdrew himself, and 
tiptoed down the corridor again. The devotional tenant, 
unaware of any entrance, but knowing the rule of the 
house, continued to inhale his cigar, and puff the aromatic 
evidence of his crime up the chimney. . . . Though my 
father knew that his chaplains smoked, he would never 
acknowledge it, and if a letter, difficultly drafted and 
brought to him for his approval, bore unmistakable evi- 
dences of this aid to inspiration, he would sniff at the 
original letter and its answer, and say, "He must have 
written it in a smoking-carriage." And though, again, 
he knew quite well that all his three sons smoked like 



240 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

chimneys, I have heard him confidently assert that none 
of us ever did. He would have liked to believe that. 
In fact he would have liked it so much, that his fervour 
allowed him to believe it. 

But I am sure it never entered his head that my mother 
smoked. She did: and once after a journey of a day and 
a night and half a day to the Riff el Alp, my father, abso- 
lutely unfatigued, insisted on the whole family getting 
on to a glacier of some sort without delay. My mother 
racked with headache, but thinking the air would do her 
good, came with us, but having gained the glacier, refused 
to proceed, and sat down on a rock on the moraine to 
wait for her family's return. She indicated that I should 
stay with her, and as soon as the family's back was 
turned she whispered, "Oh, give me a cigarette, Fred." 
By some strange mischance I hadn't got one, and was only 
possessed of a small and reeking clay pipe and some to- 
bacco. But I filled and lit it for her, and there she sat 
smoking her clay pipe like a gipsy-woman, which made 
me laugh so much that the rest of the family turned round 
en bloc to see what was happening. Nothing appeared 
to be happening, because she was wise enough to hand the 
pipe back to me, and on they went. Then she had a 
little more, and her headache was routed. . . . 

That RifTel Alp holiday was one of the most sump- 
tuous. Mountain-climbing with guides and porters is an 
expensive pursuit, but my father "treated me" straight off 
to any two first-class peaks I wanted to ascend. My in- 
stant first choice was the Matterhorn, and after a few 
days' gymnastics on less austere summits I set forth, 
chaperoned by the most zealous of Alpinists, Mr. Toswill, 
to make this adorable ascent. We slept in the Schwarz- 
See Hotel, and starting at a moonless midnight to the 



THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN 241 

light of a lantern, stumbled on in that inconvenient il- 
lumination till the first hint of dawn made the east dove- 
coloured and the lantern could be quenched. The excite- 
ment of the climb quickened the perceptions, and that 
opening flower of day was the very glory of the Lord, 
first shining on the earth. We still climbed in the clear 
dusk, but high, incredibly high above us the top of the 
great cliff grew rose-coloured, as the sun, still below our 
horizon, smote it with day. The sky was clear and the 
stars grew dim, as the great halls of heaven were slowly 
flooded with light. Step by step the day descended 
from peak to shoulder of our mountain till it met us 
on the rocky stair. Dent Blanche, Rothorn, Gabelhorn, 
Weisshorn were dazzled with the dawn: looking down 
into the Zermatt valley was still like gazing into dark 
clear water. 

But that clarity of morning was not for long. On all 
sides clouds were forming— it is a mistake as a rule to 
speak of clouds "coming up" : they just happen — and be- 
fore we reached the famous shoulder, it was certain that 
if we were to make our peak, we must race against the 
thickening weather. Already the range along the Theo- 
dul was blanketed, and mist-wreaths were beginning to 
form on the east side of our mountain below us. If they 
stopped there and did not form higher up they would do 
us no harm, but nobody would choose to be above the 
shoulder of the Matterhorn in cloud. So at high speed — 
duly recorded in the Visitors' Book at the hut — we made 
our peak, opened the bottle of Bouvier (most of which 
in that low pressure of the air rose like a geyser and in- 
toxicated the snows) and began the descent. The air was 
notably still : not a breath of wind stirred, but somewhere 



242 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

below us there were boomings of thunder not very re- 
mote. 

Before we got back to the shoulder a wisp of cloud 
flicked round the edge of the precipice which plunges a 
sheer four thousand feet on to the Zmutt glacier, and in a 
moment we were enveloped by it. The sun was ex- 
punged, the cold suddenly grew intense, and snow denser 
than I thought possible that snow could be, began to fall. 
In five minutes we wore the thickest white mantles, so too, 
which was less convenient, did the rocks, which at this 
point are not only difficult by reason of their steepness, 
but dangerous because of the downward slope of the 
strata. The thunder moved up to meet us, in fact we 
were just beginning to pass into the storm-clouds them- 
selves. The air was highly charged with electricity, for 
presently the points of our ice-axes fizzled and sang like 
kettles on the boil. Then below, a light, violet and vivid, 
leaped suddenly out of the murk of snow, and the 
thunder reverberated sharp as the crack of a dog-whip. 
Once our rope got fouled, and we all had to untie our- 
selves and stand perched on our steps, while the guide 
wrought to release it. Forty highly exciting minutes en- 
abled us to crawl down through the storm, and reach clear 
air again, and though I am glad to have dived through a 
thunderstorm on the Matterhorn, I will willingly dis- 
pense with any further experience of the sort. Those 
forty minutes rattling with ambient thunder were much 
too tense to allow of conscious alarm, and I never wished 
I was "safe home" again. But I would never choose to do 
it a second time. 

My second selection was the Dent Blanche, but after 
starting for it a blizzard made the ascent impossible. So 
for fear of losing my second big peak altogether — things 



THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN 243 

like the Breithorn, ascents of the Riffelhorn from the 
glacier, and a subsequent crossing of the eastern face of 
the Matterhorn were picked up by the way — I chose the 
Zienal Rothhorn, and with Nellie made an entrancing 
ascent. There was a huge cowl of snow on the summit, 
and sheltered by this from the wind we sat for nearly 
an hour 'in the blaze of the translucent day. Coming 
down an ill-fitting boot tore the base of one of her nails, 
and she was in bed next day with considerable pain. But 
with what scorn she answered my query as to whether, 
on her part, the expedition had been worth such a pay- 
ment. Simultaneously there began a week's bad weather, 
and we produced a stupendous Swiss Saturday Magazine. 

My third year at Cambridge, it may be remembered, I 
had resolved to devote to a strenuous course of the 
classical tongues, and the autumn of 1889 saw me P ro " 
vided with a shelf of interleaved Latin and Greek authors 
(in order to make quantities of profound notes on the 
opposite page) ; with a firm determination to remember 
every crabbed phrase in case of finding some approximate 
English equivalent in passages set for translation from 
English into Baboo Latin or Greek, and triumphantly 
dragging it in; with pots of red ink to underline them, 
and with an optimistic determination of getting a first 
in my Classical Tripos. Eustace Miles who could work 
longer and more steadily than anyone I ever came across 
before or since, became the anchor to keep me moored 
on the rock of industry, despite the engaging tides and 
currents that made me long to drift away, and I would 
take my books to his room and vow that I would remain 
glued to them as long as he. If I worked alone my in- 
firmity of purpose was something ghastly to contemplate, 



244 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

but the living proximity of a friend who set so shining 
an example shamed me into industry. He was bound for 
the same port as I, namely, a first in the Classical Tripos, 
and was a master in the art of inventing ludicrous phrases 
which contained the key to dates, and memorized the 
events of the Peloponnesian War for me in a few unfor- 
gettable sentences. We had intervals when we set the 
table on its side to serve as a back wall for some diminu- 
tive game of squash, and then refreshed and dusty we 
followed the odious symptoms that attended the plague 
in Athens. I quite lost sight again of the beauty of the 
classical languages, for just now the learning of them 
was the mere grinding of the mills that should produce a 
particular grist. It was no leisurely artistic apprecia- 
tion, like that which had fitfully inspired me under Beesly 
and during my last year at school ; I but wanted to com- 
mit a sort of highway robbery on Sophocles and Virgil, 
and take from them the purse that should pay my way 
for a first-class ticket. After two terms of this, for the 
only time in my life, I was considered to be in danger 
of growing stale from sheer industry, and for a fortnight 
of the Easter vacation, in accordance with my father's 
suggestion, Monty James took two other undergraduates 
and myself for a bookless tour through Normandy and 
Brittany. It was nominally a walking-tour, but we went 
by train, visiting Rouen, Caen, Bayeux, and Lisieux, and 
finishing up with Amiens and Beauvais. We played 
quantities of picquet, and the Nixon saga was enriched by 
a Pindaric Ode in praise of Pnyxon winner in the tricycle 
race against two Divinity professors. . . . 

The last paper in the Tripos, after translations into 
English from Latin and Greek verse and prose, and 
translation into Latin and Greek from English, was in 



THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN 245 

classical history, of which I knew nothing whatever, and 
so I sat up three-quarters of the night and read through 
the whole of two short history primers. In the few hours 
that intervened between that degrading process and the 
history paper, it was impossible to forget crucial dates 
or events of any magnitude, and by dragging in all col- 
lateral information, and dishing it up with a certain 
culinary skill acquired by years of Saturday Magazine, I 
produced a voluminous vamp of information. And then 
after some days of waiting came the lists, and the year 
of Babooism had won its appropriate reward, for, sure 
enough, I had taken a first. As for the history, I had pro- 
duced a paper that caused me to be congratulated by 
the examiner (Dr. Verrall) on my "grasp" — acquired the 
night before — and was advised by him to take up history 
for a second Tripos. That, knowing better than he what 
the tenacity of my grasp really was, I thought better to 
decline. 

Having taken a first (such a first !) my father was more 
than pleased that, pending the choice of a profession, 
which I had already secretly registered, I should stop up 
another year and attempt to perform a similar feat in 
some other branch of knowledge. Should that also be 
accomplished, I should be of a status that could see a 
Fellowship at King's within possible horizons, and he 
wanted no finer threshold of life for any of his sons than 
a Fellowship of his college. Here then his scholastic 
sympathies were completely engaged, but infinitely more 
potent than they was his desire that we should all of us 
enter the priesthood of the Church to which, with a 
unique passion, all his life was dedicated. Arthur at this 
time, had already been an Eton master for over five years, 
and had not taken orders, and it was not likely now that 



246 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

he would. I was the next, and when my father more 
than gladly let me stop up at Cambridge with a view 
to a second Tripos, for another year, he coupled with 
his permission the desire that I should attend some Divin- 
ity lectures. Never shall I admire tact or delicacy more 
than his upon this subject. For years while at school 
he had put before me, never insistently but always po- 
tently, his hope that I should be a clergyman, so that 
now I was quite familiar with it. But at the very moment 
when a strongly expressed desire on his part might have 
determined me, he forbore to express such desire at all : 
if I was to be a clergyman I must have the personal, the 
individual sense of vocation, and not take orders because 
Jie wished it. Already I knew that he wished it, but he 
would not stir a finger, now that I had come to an age 
when definite choice opened before me, to influence my 
decision. He wished me to attend Divinity lectures in 
order to learn something before I either chose or rejected, 
but beyond that he never said a word in argument or 
persuasion, nor even asked me if I had attended these 
lectures. At the very moment, in fact, when his wish, 
had he expressed it, that I should take a theological 
Tripos with a view to ordination, would have had effect- 
ive weight, seeing that he was allowing me to spend a 
fourth year at Cambridge, he, with a supreme and perfect 
delicacy, forbore to put a pennyweight of his own desires 
into the scale, and welcomed the choice I made of taking 
up archaeology for a second Tripos. He merely wished 
me to attend a few divinity lectures, and left it at that. 
Hugh, meantime, triumphantly carrying the banner of 
early failure which I had so long held against all comers, 
had unsuccessfully competed, after a year of cramming, 
in the Indian Civil Service examination, which had been 



THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN 247 

his first choice of a profession. Having failed in that, 
he was to come up to Trinity in October, unblushing and 
unhonoured. I passed the banner to him with all good 
wishes. 

There were some weeks of long vacation after the 
archaeological decision was made which I now know to 
have been loaded with fate so far as my own subse- 
quent life was concerned, though at the time those scrib- 
blings I then indulged in seemed to be quite as void of 
significance as any particular number of the Saturday 
Magazine had been. For one morning, at Cambridge, 
where I had returned for a few weeks before we went 
out to Switzerland in August, I desisted from the perusal 
of Miss Harrison's Mythology and Monuments of 
Ancient Athens, and wrote on the top of a piece of blue 
foolscap a word that has stuck to me all my life. For a 
long time there had been wandering about in my head 
the idea of some fascinating sort of modern girl, who 
tackled life with uncommon relish and success, and was 
adored by the world in general, and had all the embellish- 
ments that a human being can desire except a heart. 
Years ago some adumbration of her had occurred in the 
story that Maggie and I wrote together; that I suppose 
was the yeast that was now beginning to stir and bubble 
in my head. She must ride, she must dance, she must 
have all the nameless attraction that attaches to those 
who are as prismatic and as hard as crystal, and above all 
she must talk. It was no use just informing the reader 
that here was a marvellously fascinating personality, as 
Maggie and I had done before, or that to see her was to 
worship her, or that after a due meed of worship she 
would reveal herself as no more than husk and colouring 
matter. Explanations and assurances of that sort were 



248 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

now altogether to be dispensed with. Scarcely even was 
the current of her thought, scarcely even were the main 
lines of her personality to be drawn: she was to reveal 
herself by what she said, and thus, whatever she did, 
would need no comment. There is the plain presentment 
of the idea that occupied my youthful mind when I wrote 
Dodo at the top of a piece of blue foolscap, and put the 
numeral "one" on the top right-hand corner; and where 
this crude story of mine still puts in a plea for originality, 
is in the region of its conscious plan. Bad or good (it 
was undoubtedly bad) it introduced a certain novelty 
into novel-writing which had "quite a little vogue" for a 
time. The main character, that is to say, was made, in 
her infinitesimal manner, to draw herself. In staged and 
acted drama even, that principle — bad or good — is never 
consistently maintained, because other people habitually 
discuss the hero and heroine, and the audience's concep- 
tion of them is based on comment as well as on self- 
spoken revelation. Also in drama there is bound to be 
some sort of plot, in which action reveals the actor. But 
in this story which I scribbled at for a few weeks, there 
was no sort of plot: there was merely a clash of minor 
personalities breaking themselves to bits against the cen- 
tral gabbling figure. Hideously crude, blatantly inef- 
ficient as the execution was, there was just that one new 
and feasible idea in the manner of it. What I aimed 
at was a type that revealed itself in an individual by 
oceans of nonsensical speech. 

I wrote with the breathless speed of creation (however 
minute such creation was), almost entirely, but not quite, 
for my own private amusement. It was not quite for 
that internal satisfaction alone, because as I scampered 
and scamped, I began to contemplate a book arising out 



THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN 249 

of these scribblings, a marketable book, that is to say, 
between covers and for sale. Eventually, for the infor- 
mation of any who happen to remember the total result, 
I got as far as the lamentable death of Dodo's first hus- 
band, and that, as far as I knew then, was the end of 
the story. Dodo would be thus left a far from discon- 
solate widow dangling in the air like a blind-string in 
front of an open window. On the last page of the book, 
she would remain precisely as she had been on the first; 
she had not developed, she had not gone upwards or 
downwards in any moral course ; she was a moment, a de- 
tail, a flashlight photograph flared on to a plate without 
the smallest presentment of anything, except what she 
happened to be at that moment. All this I did not then 
realize. . . . There it was anyhow, and having finished 
it, I bundled the whole affair into a drawer, and with 
that off my mind, concentrated again over the Mythology 
and Monuments of Ancient Athens. 

Then followed a few weeks at the Rieder Furca Hotel, 
above the Aletsch Glacier, opposite the Bel Alp. At that 
time it was a wooden structure of so light and airy a 
build that without raising your voice you could talk 
through the wall to the person next door. Maggie that 
year was obliged to go to Aix for a course of treatment 
and my mother went with her, but, even as it was, we 
nearly filled the little hotel. The weather was bad, 
an ascent of the Jungfrau which I made in very thick soft 
snow, after sleeping for two nights at the Concordia hut 
being the only big (and that an abominable) climb, and 
there was a great deal of "Cotter's Saturday Night." My 
father had a larger supply of books than usual, for he was 
busy with his judgment in the Lincoln trial, to be de- 
livered in the autumn. For a couple of years the case 



250 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

had been a perpetual anxiety to him. It was doubtful 
at first whether he, as Archbishop, possessed the jurisdic- 
tion to try it, and while personally (to put the matter 
in a nutshell) he was very unwilling to do so, he did 
not want the jurisdiction of the See, if it possessed it, to 
lapse. The case was one of illegal ritual : and the Church 
Association party, at whose instigation it was started, had 
obtained their evidence in a manner peculiarly sordid, for 
they had sent emissaries to spy on Bishop King's manner 
of celebrating the Holy Communion. As their object 
was to obtain evidence on that point, it is difficult to 
see how else they could have obtained it, but the notion 
of evidence thus obtained was revolting to my father. 
On the other hand there was Bishop King, a man of the 
highest character, of saintly life, an old and beloved 
friend of my father's, who was thus accused of illegality 
in matters which to the ordinary lay and even clerical 
mind were of infinitesimal importance. But the indict- 
ment was that he had offended against Ecclesiastical Law, 
which my father as head of the Church was bound to up- 
hold, so that when, after innumerable arguments and dis- 
cussion, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council 
found that he had the jurisdiction, he decided to assume 
it. That being so, he could dismiss the case as being a 
frivolous indictment, but this course undoubtedly would 
have caused a split in the English Church, and accord- 
ingly he decided to try it. It was heard in February, 
1890, and he reserved judgment. It was this pronounce- 
ment that occupied him so closely all that summer, and 
he finished it in September. 

At the beginning of October, Hugh went up to Cam- 
bridge, for the assembling of freshmen, and I had still 
some ten days which I spent at Addington. Arthur was 



THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN 251 

already back at Eton, my father and mother and Maggie 
soon went off on some visit, and thus it happened that 
Nellie and I for a few days were alone there. We had 
breakfast very late, with a sense of complete uncontrol, 
we rode and we played lawn-tennis and talked in the 
desultory argumentative manner that we both thoroughly 
enjoyed. In particular we played at "old games," and 
Beth used to join us. That year the big cedar in the gar- 
den was covered with little immature cones, full of a yel- 
low powder like sulphur, and we collected this in glass- 
topped pill-boxes, part of the ancient apparatus of the 
moth-collections, shaking the sulphur-laden cones into 
them, and filling each full to the brim. There was no 
design as to what we were to do with these: there was 
just some reversion in our minds to childish "treasures," 
like the spa and the dead hornet in the aquarium. It was 
enough to fill these little pill-boxes with the cedar-pollen, 
and screw the lids on, and know that half a dozen boxes 
were charged to the brim. We were quite aimless, we 
saw nobody but Beth, and were wonderfully content. I 
did a little reading in Overbeck's Schriftquellen, and 
Nellie translated the German part of it to me, to save 
time. There was nothing more to remember of those days 
except that delicious sense of leisure and love and 
liberty: we did nothing except what we wanted to do, 
and what we seemed to want was to be ridiculous chil- 
dren again. Eventually, after some four or five days, 
came the afternoon when I had to go back to Cambridge ; 
my father and mother were coming back to Addington 
that day or the next. Nellie and I parted, greatly regret- 
ting that these silly days were done, and made plans for 
Christmas. 

A week or so afterwards, I got a letter from my mother, 



252 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

saying that Nellie had a diphtheritic sore throat. Anxious 
news came after that for a few days, but on a certain 
Sunday I had tidings that she was going on well. Early 
on Monday morning I got a telegram telling me to come 
home at once, for she was very much worse. I went round 
to Trinity to see Hugh, and found he had received a 
similar telegram. There was a train to London half an 
hour later, and as I was packing a bag the post came 
in with reassuring news. But that had been written the 
day before : the telegram was of later date. 

She had died that morning, facing death with the fear- 
less welcome that she had always given to any new ex- 
perience. During her illness she had not been able to 
speak at all, but had written little sentences on scraps of 
paper; after the nature of it was declared she had been 
completely isolated, but her nurse disinfected these notes 
and sent them to the others. The first was a joyful little 
line to my mother, saying that as she had to be in bed, 
she was going to have a good spell of writing at a story 
she was engaged on. At the end, the last note but one 
had been for her nurse; in this she had thanked her and 
asked, "Is there anything I can do*?" Her nurse 
answered her when she read it, "Let patience do her per- 
fect work." ... So that was off Nellie's mind. And 
then last of all she wrote to my mother who was by her 
bed and she traced out, "I wonder what it will be like. 
Give them all my love." Then my mother began saying 
to her, "Jesu, Lover of my soul," and while she was 
saying it, Nellie died. 

That afternoon, we, the rest of us, went out on that 
still sunny October day and strolled through the woods 
together, splitting up into twos and threes and rejoining 
again. My mother seemed to have her hand in Nellie's 



THE CIRCLE IS BROKEN 253 

all the time, telling us, who had come too late, tran- 
quilly and serenely, how the days had gone, and how 
patient she had been and how cheerful. We recalled all 
sorts of things about her, with smiles and with laughter, 
and there was no sense of loss, for my mother brought her 
amongst us, and never let go of her. Then, back in the 
house again, there were other arrangements to be made : 
it was settled that Arthur, Hugh and I should go back to 
Eton and Cambridge as soon as we could, but after the 
funeral we must spend a week of quarantine somewhere. 
How Nellie had got diphtheria was obscure, and it was 
better that we should not sleep in the house, or run a 
possible risk of infection. I wanted to see her, but my 
mother said that what I wanted to see was not Nellie at 
all, and that I must think of her as I had known her. 
And as I knew her, so she has always remained for me, 
collecting the cedar-sulphur, or laughing with open 
mouth, or grave and eager with sympathy. The glass- 
lidded pill-boxes were on a ledge of a bookcase, where 
we had left them a week or two before. My mother had 
seen them, and thought that there was probably some 
mystic significance about them, so I told her how Nellie 
and I had gathered them, and she said, "What treasures: 
bless her!" Golden October weather it was, with frosts 
at night and windless days, and the chestnut leaves came 
peeling off the trees and falling in a heap of tawny yellow 
below them, each leaf twirling in the air as it fell. 

She was buried in Addington churchyard and next her 
now lies Maggie, and on her other side my mother. 

My father, all the time of Nellie's illness, had been 
hard at work on the final revision of his Lincoln judg- 
ment: now the delivery of that was postponed for a little, 



254 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

but not for long. Everyone had to get back normally and 
naturally to the work and the play and the joy and sor- 
row of life again, but at the Christmas holidays it was 
seen how huge a gap had come in the circle which since 
Martin's death, twelve years before, had grown up to- 
gether, critical and devoted and wildly alive. No one, 
when all were so intent on the businesses in hand, had es- 
timated when a play, for instance, must be written and 
rehearsed and managed, how largely it was Nellie's en- 
thusiastic energy that carried things through. So there 
was no play that Christmas, and the year after four of 
us, my father and mother and Maggie and I, were in 
Algiers, another year they were in Florence, and another 
Maggie and I were in Egypt, and so that particular blaze 
of young activity of which Christmas holidays had been 
the type and flower came to an end. Besides we were all 
getting older, and there was no Nellie; with her death 
some unrecapturable magic was lost. 

Of the many intimate friendships of my mother's life 
none was closer than that which had ripened during these 
years at Lambeth with Lucy Tait, the daughter of the 
late Archbishop. She had constantly been with us in 
town and at Addington, and now, after Nellie's death, 
she made her permanent home with us. Then, when the 
Lambeth days were over she continued, until my mother's 
death, twenty-two years later, to devote her life to her. 



CHAPTER XII 

AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 

AT Cambridge the study of archaeology had forcibly 
taken possession of me by right of love, and at last 
I was working at that which it was my business to be 
occupied in, with devotion to my subject. Roman art, 
so I speedily discovered, was an utterly hideous and de- 
based affair in itself, and the only things of beauty that 
emerged from Rome were copies of Greek originals, and 
even then these copies were probably made by Greek 
workmen. In Roman buildings also all that was worth 
looking at was stolen from the Greeks, and often marred 
in the stealing, and the thick mortar between their roughly 
hewn stones, the facing of them with a dishonest veneer 
of marble, their abominable tessellated pavements, the 
odious wall decorations of Pompeii revolted this ardent 
Hellenist. Now, too, for the first time since I came up to 
Cambridge, I came under an inspired and inspiring 
teacher; indeed, there were two such, for it was impossible 
not to burn when Dr. Waldstein in the Museum of Casts 
flung himself into Hellenic attitudes, and communicated 
his volcanic enthusiasm. But more inspiring yet was 
Professor Middleton : he gave me no formal lectures, but 
encouraged me to bn^.g my books to his room, and spend 
the morning there. He used to walk about in a thick 
dressing-gown and a skull-cap, looking like some Oriental 
magician, and now he would pull an intaglio ring off his 

255 



256 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

finger and make me perceive the serene and matchless 
sobriety of an early gem as compared with the more 
florid design, still matchless in workmanship, of a later 
century, or take half a dozen Greek coins out of his waist- 
coat pocket and bid me decipher the thick decorative let- 
ters and tell him where they came from. He had dozens 
of notebooks filled with sketches of Greek mouldings and 
cornices : there were sections of the columns of the Parthe- 
non that showed how the drums had been ground round 
each on the other, till, without any mess of mortar, they 
adhered so closely that the joint was scarcely visible. 
There were cedar-wood blocks in the centres of them with 
bronze pins round which they revolved; the honesty and 
precision of the workmanship could never be discovered 
till the column was in ruins. But there was the very 
spirit and ardency of Greece ; and as for the great frieze 
of horsemen sculptured on the walls of the Parthenon it 
was so placed that only a mere glimpse of it could be had 
by those who walked in the colonnade. k Yet in honour of 
the goddess and in obedience to the imperious craving 
for perfection, it, though scarcely to be seen, must be of 
a fineness and finish unequalled in all the forums of 
Rome. Then Middleton would take a fragment of Greek 
pottery from a drawer, or a white lekythus from Eretria, 
and show me the mark of the potter's wheel, and how the 
white ground was laid on after the baking, and how the 
artist with brush delicate and unerring had drawn the 
raised arm of the ephebus who laid his garland on the 
tomb. There were photographs also from the Street of 
Tombs; in one there was standing a young girl with 
braided hair. She it was who was dead, and the mother 
stood in front of her lifting the small face upwards with 
a hand under her chin, bending to kiss her for the last 



AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 257 

time, and such of the inscription as remained ran 
XAIPEHENO . . . The rest of the letters was gone, 
but that was sufficient, and told how her mother gave 
the final greeting of Godspeed and of farewell to 
Penthesilea, for in that beautiful tongue "Hail"! and 
"Good-bye" are the same word and affectionately wish 
prosperity, whether for one who returns to the home, or 
goes from the home on the longest journey of all. And 
Professor Middleton made me realize the serenity of those 
good wishes for Penthesilea : there was a wistfulness on 
the part of those who remained, and a wonder and a great 
hope, and God knows how that struck home to me. . . . 
Or a young man sat languid on a rock, and his hunting 
spear was propped behind him, and beside him just one 
companion, weary with watching, had fallen asleep. 
There was no mother there to send him on his way; his 
friend and his hunting-spear were his comrades on earth, 
and these he must leave behind him, when to-day he fared 
out on his new adventure, further afield than ever his 
huntings had taken him. . . . And thus to me, the 
supreme race of all who have inhabited this earth became 
real. They heard the voice of creation as none other has 
heard it, and saw as none other has seen. They realized 
in dawn and in nightfall the attainment towards which 
all others have fruitlessly striven, showing in marble the 
humanity of the divine, and the divinity of man; they 
had birthdays for their gods, and for their dead, who 
died not, they had the imperishable love that knows not 
fear. 

Professor Middleton never alluded in any way to this 
archaeological tripos which I was to challenge after one 
year's work. All the morning, three times a week or 
more, I used to sit there with my books that I never read, 



258 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

because he, in his dressing-gown, produced, one after the 
other, little bits of things which would make me love the 
Greeks for no other reason than for the artistic joy of 
their works and days. He knew of course that there was 
a tripos impending, and this in his view was the best way 
of preparing for it; while for drier stuff he gave me his 
notebooks on Vitruvius, which would, with his little ex- 
quisite sections and elevations, explain all that I need 
know about the bones and alphabet of architecture. His 
whole procedure, as I saw then, and his whole object 
was to make me want to know, down to their sandals and 
their salad-bowls and brooches, all that was to be learned 
of the brains of a god-like race. Once, so I remember, a 
bitter blizzard white with snow beat against the windows, 
and from some roof near a slate flew off and crashed in 
the small court at King's where the mulberry tree grew. 
"That was Oreithyia," he said, sucking on his pipe. 
"Boreas loved her, and blew her away. Rude Boreas, you 
know. You should read up the myths. Most of Greek 
sculpture illustrates myths." 

Since the days when I was fifteen, since Beesly and the 
Trojan Queen's Revenge, there had been no such inspirer. 
But Beesly dealt only with language, while under Mid- 
dleton the dry bones which had come together, not only 
stood up "an exceeding great army," but went about their 
work, and returned to their homes of an evening, and 
lived and loved. Beesly had brought me to the portals 
of the house of the people who made Art, and knocked 
on the door for me. But Middleton pushed it open, and 
the gold standard of the Greeks that, theoretically, seven 
years ago I knew to be the only coinage, was now weighed 
and was found sufficient, and all else whatever baser stuff 
might load the opposing balance was found wanting. 



AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 259 

It was at some time during that year that J. K. Stephen, 
the founder of the T.A.F., returned to King's, and in- 
stantly for me all the lesser lights of general influence 
were eclipsed. In presence and personality alike he was 
one of those who without effort or aim impose themselves 
on their circle. Had he never said a word, the very fact 
of his being in the room must have produced more effect 
that any conversation that might go on round him. He 
was splendidly handsome, big of head, impressive and 
regular of feature, and enormously massive in build ; slow 
moving and shambling when he walked, but somehow 
monumental. He had an immense fund of humour, grim 
and rather savage at times, at others of such froth and 
frolic as appeared in the two volumes of verse which 
he published during the next year, Lapsus Calami, and 
Quo Musa tendis. But this bubbling lightness was 
markedly uncharacteristic of his normal self. That it 
was there, those two volumes proved, but that particular 
spring, that light-hearted Puck-like quality, he certainly 
reserved for his verse, which to those who knew him was 
in no way the flower of his mind. In the dedication to 
Lapsus Calami, he expresses the desire that the reader 
should recognize his debt to "C.S.C." (Calverley of Fly 
Leaves), he hopes that some one will think that "of C.S.C. 
this gentle art he learned," and undoubtedly the reader 
did think so, for it was certainly C.S.C. whose method 
inspired some of these poems. But it is just these poems 
in which he was obviously indebted to Calverley, that 
are least worthy and characteristic of him. Jim Stephen 
made, at his worst, amusing neat little rhymes not nearly 
so good as Calverley's, but, at his best, he made poems, 
such as "The Old School List," of which Calverley was 
quite incapable. Both also were brilliant parodists, but 



260 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

here J.K.S. had a far subtler art than the man with whom 
he hoped his readers would compare him. Calverley's 
famous parody of Robert Browning, "The Cock and the 
Bull," does not touch in point of rapier-work J.K.S.'s 
poem "Sincere Flattery to R.B." The one does no more 
than seize on ridiculous phrases in Browning, and go a 
shade further in absurdity: the other ("Birthdays") 
parodies the very essence of the more obscure lyrics : you 
cannot read it, however often you have done so, without 
the hope that you may this time or the next find out what 
it means. He was the inventor, too, of a peculiarly 
pleasing artifice with regard to parody, for he put into 
Wordsworth's mouth, for instance, in pure Words- 
worthian phrase, the exact opposite of Wordsworth's 
teaching, and produced a lament over the want of loco- 
motive power in the Lake district. The effect is inimit- 
able : the poet longs to see in those happy days when Hel- 
vellyn's base is tunnelled, and its peak grimy 

The dusky grove of iron rails 
Which leads to Euston Square, 

and in lines that almost must have been written by 
Wordsworth exclaims: 

I want to hear the porters cry, 
"Change here for Ennerdale !" 

And I must be forgiven, since so few know the poem, for 
quoting the postscript to his parody of Browning, suffi- 
cient surely to make the poet, for whom Jim Stephen had 
an immense reverence, turn in his grave in order to laugh 
more easily. As follows : 



AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 261 

P.S. 

There's a Me Society down at Cambridge 
Where my works, cum notis variorum 
Are talked about : well, I require the same bridge 
As Euclid took toll at as Asinorum. 

And as they have got through several ditties 
I thought were as stiff as a brick-built wall 
I've composed the above, and a stiff one it is, 
A bridge to stop asses at, once for all. 

If the art of parody can go further, I do not know who 
has conducted it there. The kindly ghost of Robert 
Browning might perhaps shrug his shoulders at "The 
Cock and the Bull," and say, "Very amusing" : but read- 
ing Jim Stephen's R.B. he must surely have winced and 
frowned first, and thereafter broken into a roar of his 
most genial laughter. 

Often (when not indebted to C.S.C.) Jim Stephen's 
most apt and biting parodies would be written or spouted 
extempore: I remember for instance someone reading a 
rather lamentable verse from F. W. Myers in which he 
delicately alludes to the godly procreation of children 
in the following lines : 

Lo! when a man magnanimous and tender, 
Lo! when a woman desperate and true, 
Make the irrevocable sweet surrender, 
Show to each other what the Lord can do. 

upon which Jim Stephen without a moment's pause ex- 
claimed : 

Lo! when a man cbscene and superstitious, 
Lo! when a woman brainless and absurd, 
Strive to idealize the meretricious, 
Love one another like a beast or bird. 



262 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

This could not be included in Lapsus Calami, nor un- 
fortunately would he include one of his most ingenious 
extravagances, and I cannot find that it has ever been 
published. The subject matter was that a burglar "des- 
perate and true" awoke in the night and found an angel 
standing in his room, who asked him whether, being what 
he was, he would sooner go to heaven or hell, the choice 
being entirely his. His admirably logical conclusion was 
as follows: 

The burning at first no doubt would be worst, 
But custom that anguish would soften ; 
But those who are bored by praising the Lord, 
Would be more so by praising him often. 

He chooses accordingly. 

All that year Jim remained in residence at Cambridge ; 
during one vacation he stayed with us at Addington, dur- 
ing another I went over to his Irish home, where, one 
evening after an argument about Kipling, he took up his 
bedroom candle saying, "Well, I wish he would stop 
kipling. Good night." In ten minutes he came back, 
"I've written a poem about it," he said, and proceeded to 
read the two immortal stanzas which end, 

When the Rudyards cease from kipling, 
And the Haggards ride no more. 

Close friends though we were, I was always conscious of 
a side of him that was formidable, of the possibility of a 
sudden blaze of anger flaring up though quickly ex- 
tinguished again: there was, too, always present the 
knowledge of that "dark tremendous sea of cloud" in the 
skirts of which he had been before, and into the heart f of 



AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 263 

which it was inscrutably decreed that he must go. There 
came a dark December morning; that time the breakdown 
was final, and he lived not many weeks. 

Once again I made a triumphant tripos in the matter of 
archseology, was given an open scholarship at King's, and 
immediately afterwards applied for one of those grants 
that seemed to hang like ripe plums on the delightful 
tree of knowledge. Hitherto those branches had waved 
high above my head, but now they graciously swept down- 
wards and I plucked at the first plum I saw, and applied 
for a small grant to excavate in the town-walls at 
Chester. There was reason to suppose that quantities of 
the Roman tombstones of the legionaries that had been 
stationed there, had been utilized in the building of the 
town-wall, and though there were only Roman remains 
to be discovered (would that they had been Greek!) the 
search for them would be a very pleasant pursuit for the 
autumn, and might yield material for a fellowship-dis- 
sertation. To my intense surprise some grant — from the 
Wiirtz Fund, I think — was given me, for the purpose of 
discovering, if possible, new facts about the distribution 
of Roman legions in Britain. 

The family went out to Pontresina that August, and I 
with them for a week or two before the work at Chester 
began. There I had a most horrible experience with 
Hugh on the Piz Palu, one of the peaks of the Bernina. 
Our plan was to make a "col" of it, that is to ascend it 
on one side, pass over the top, and descend on another. 
We tramped and perspired up southern slopes in deep 
snow on the ascent, struck an arete which led to the top, 
made the summit, and began to descend by another route. 
The way lay over a long ridge swept by the most biting 



264 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

north wind, from which on the ascent the mountain had 
screened us, and never have I encountered so wicked a 
blast. The loose snow whirled up from the rocks was 
driven against us as if it was torrents of icy rain, pierc- 
ing and penetrating. Once as we halted, I noticed that 
Hugh shut his eyes, and seemed sleepy, but he said that 
he was all right and on we went. He was on the rope 
just in front of me behind the leading guide, and sud- 
denly, without stumbling, he fell down in a heap. He 
was just conscious when we picked him up and said, "I'm 
only rather sleepy; let me go to sleep . . ." and then 
collapsed again. 

He was alive and little more. Raw brandy, of which 
we had about half a pint, stimulated him for a moment, 
and soon, after another and another dose, our brandy was 
gone. There was no question of the inadvisability of giv- 
ing him spirits, in order to warm him, which is one of the 
most fatal errors when a climber is suffering from mere 
cold : there was just the hope of keeping him alive by any 
stimulant. It was not possible to go back over the sum- 
mit, and so to get into more sheltered conditions again; 
the best chance, and that a poor one, was to convey him 
down somehow along the rest of this bitter ridge, till 
we could find shelter from the wind. Very soon he be- 
came completely unconscious, he could move no more at 
all, and the guide and the porter whom we had with us 
simply carried him along the rest of the ridge. The rope 
was altogether a hindrance, so we took it off, and pro- 
ceeded in two separate parties. The guides carried Hugh 
between them, and I followed. 

I had no idea after we had made this arrangement if 
Hugh was alive or not ; often I had to wait till they got 
round some awkward corner, and then make my way after 



AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 265 

them. Places that would have been easily traversed by 
a roped party, took on a totally different aspect, when two 
men unroped were carrying another, and when the fourth 
of the party had to traverse them alone. What chiefly 
occupied my benumbed mind was the sort of telegram 
that would be sent to my father when we got down to the 
foot of the glacier below, where there was communication 
with Pontresina. Should I be sending a telegram that 
Hugh was dead, or should I have slipped, and thus be 
incapable of sending a telegram at all, or would nobody 
come back? . . . For some hour or so this procession 
went on its way: after I had waited for the trio to get 
round some rock or obstruction on the ridge, I followed, 
and caught sight of them again a dozen yards further 
down. Whether they were carrying a corpse or not I 
had no idea. 

Gradually we came to the end of this ridge. I had 
waited for them to scramble over a difficult passage, and 
then they disappeared round a corner. One of the guides 
had loosened a rock, and when I tried to step on it, it 
gave way altogether and rattled down the almost precipi- 
tous slope to the side. I had recovered on to my original 
standing-ground, but with that rock gone, and being 
alone and unroped, it took me some couple of minutes, 
I suppose, to find a reliable foothold. When that was 
done, a couple of steps more brought me, as it had brought 
them, completely out of the wind, and on to a broiling 
southern slope. Fifty feet below me there came another 
corner, which they had already passed, and I could see 
nothing further. I went round that corner, and found the 
two guides roaring with laughter and Hugh quite drunk. 
He was making some sort of ineffectual attempt to sit 
on the point of his ice-axe. He was not dead at all : he 



266 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

was only drunk. The moment, apparently, that they had 
got out of that icy blast, his heart-action must have re- 
asserted itself, and there was a half-pint of raw brandy 
poured into an empty stomach to render accounts. With 
thick and stumbling speech, he staggered along, assur- 
ing us that he had only been rather sleepy. . . . And so 
he had, and I emptied the line snow that had been driven 
in about my knees through my knickerbockers, and had 
no need to send any telegrams. 

Except for that adventure, which I would gladly have 
done without, Pontresina was an uneventful place, rather 
picnicky and wearisome. There was a friend of my sister 
Maggie there under the sentence of the white death: 
there was an elderly bishop who attached himself some- 
what to our party : there was Miss Margot Tennant whom 
then I met for the first time; and after a rather dull fort- 
night, I turned back to England to embrace the career, at 
Chester, of a serious archaeologist. 

Now there was no particular reason why the Corpo- 
ration of Chester should allow a young gentleman from 
Cambridge University to pull the city walls about, in the 
hope of extracting therefrom Roman tombstones, even 
though he was quite willing that these monuments, if 
discovered, should be presented to the local museum. So 
with a view to securing a warmer welcome, I had got 
my father to write to the Duke of Westminster at Eaton, 
and this was a gloriously successful move. I went over 
to see him, explained the plan, and got his support. He 
in turn wrote to the Mayor urging the claims of archae- 
ology on an enlightened town, and gave me £50 to aug- 
ment the grant from the Wiirtz fund. The technical part 
of the work, the underpinning of the wall, the subsequent 



AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 267 

building of it up again in case we extracted Roman tomb- 
stones from it was entrusted to the city surveyor: local 
subscriptions came in, and tombstones of considerable im- 
portance came out, for we found that a legion, "Legio 
Decima Valeria Vdctrix" (The victorious Valerian), 
whose presence in England was hitherto unknown, had 
been stationed at Chester. Professor Mommsen, the his- 
torian, must be informed about that, and the copies of 
these tombstones must be sent him, and these produced a 
letter of congratulation and acknowledgment from the 
great man. I skipped with joy over that, for was not 
this an apotheosis for the family dunce, that Professor 
Mommsen should applaud his work*? And again I 
skipped when one of the famous post-cards came from 
Hawarden, asking me to come over and tell Mr. Glad- 
stone about these finds. The sense of diplomacy spiced 
that adventure, for profoundly ignorant though I was 
about politics, I had just the prudence to be aware that 
Eaton and Hawarden must not be put, so to speak, into 
one pocket, since Mr. Gladstone with his policies of 
Home Rule for Ireland and the Disestablishment of the 
Welsh Church had digged a gulf of liquid fire between 
himself and the Duke. There must be nothing said that 
could tend to stoke that, and strict was the guard that 
I set on my lips. 

All are agreed on the sense of the terrific latent energy 
with which that quiet country-house was stored : there was 
high tension in its tranquillity. You felt that if you 
touched anything a great electric spark might flare with 
a cracking explosion towards your extended finger. . . . 
I got there during the morning and was at once taken to 
see Mr. Gladstone. He was in his study, sitting at his 



268 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

"political" table: that other table was the table where 
he worked at Homer, so he presently explained to me, sug- 
gesting though not actually stating the image which flew 
into my mind, of his boiling over, so to speak, at the 
political table, that furnace of fierce contention and 
white-hot enthusiasm, and of his putting himself to cool 
off from controversy by the Ionian Sea. He instantly 
plunged into the subject of Roman legionaries in Britain 
as if nothing else really mattered or ever had mattered to 
him, and pored over the copies of a few inscriptions I had 
brought him. But he wanted more lively evidence than 
a mere copy. 

"I should like to see the squeezes of these," he said. 
"Do you know the only proper way to make squeezes'? 
You take your sheet of blotting-paper, and after you have 
washed the stone, you lay it on, pressing the paper into 
the letters of the inscription. Then sprinkle it with 
water, but by no means wet your paper before you have 
laid it on the stone, because it is apt to tear if you do 
that. Then take a clothes brush — not too stiff a one — 
and tap the surface over and over again with the bristles. 
By degrees you will get the paper to mould itself into all 
the letters of the inscription, and where there are letters 
apparently quite perished, it will often show you some 
faint stroke from which you can conjecture what the 
missing letter has been, though it is invisible to the eye. 
And let your blotting paper get dry before you remove 
it. Otherwise again you may tear it. Yes, we are coming 
to lunch: we know," he said to Mrs. Gladstone, who 
came in for the second time to say it was ready. 

I do not of course pretend to reproduce the precise 
wording of this little dissertation on blotting-paper- 
squeezes, but there or thereabouts was the substance of it, 




E. F. BENSON, ^T. 22 



[Page 269 



AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 271 

full of detail, full of fire and gesticulation, as if he him- 
self had invented the science of squeezes, and had done 
nothing all his life but make them. 

After lunch he said he would drive me to St. Deiniol's, 
the library, chiefly theological and philosophical, that he 
was arranging, largely with his own hands, from his vast 
accumulation of books, for the benefit of the district, and 
in especial, for that of clerical students whose Church 
he had vainly attempted to disestablish. Soon after 
lunch it was announced that the carriage was round, and 
he went to the door. I had supposed that there would 
be some brougham or whatnot in charge of a coachman; 
instead there was a pony carriage for two, with a groom 
holding tight on to the pony's head. Mr. Gladstone, 
already very dim-sighted, peered at the pony, and said 
to me, "Wait a minute : that pony's a beast," and hurried 
back into the house reappearing again with a formidable 
whip. Then I became aware that he and I were going 
alone, and that Mr. Gladstone, armed with this whip 
in case the pony was "beastly," was intending to drive, 
for he took up the reins, and, as soon as I was in, said 
to the groom, "Let go, Charles," and whacked the pony 
over the rump to teach him that there was his master 
sitting inside. Under this charioteer, blind and aged and 
completely intrepid, we cantered away to St. Deiniol's, 
Mr. Gladstone pointing at objects of interest with his 
whip, and reminding the pony that he would catch it, 
if he misbehaved. From there, I think he drove me to 
the station and returned alone. I duly sent him squeezes 
prepared in the manner he had prescribed, and received 
a series of post-cards suggesting the probable readings of 
erased letters, and when next I went to Hawarden that 
autumn, there were passages he had turned up in the 



272 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

"Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum" which bore on this 
tombstone and on that, discharged at me as if from a 
volcano. . . . 

Six weeks' exploration was enough to exhaust my 
funds, and I carried my squeezes and my sketches back 
to Cambridge, there to put the results into shape. . . . 
And there I found, and re-read with a suddenly re-kindled 
interest those pages of blue foolscap on the first of which 
was the heading "Dodo." I had written them chiefly for 
my own amusement, but now, rightly or wrongly, I had 
the conviction that they might amuse others as well. But 
I really had no idea, till I took them out again, what they 
were like; now it occurred to me that the people in them 
were something like real people, and that the whole in 
point of agitating fact was something like a real book, 
that might be printed and bound. . . . But I instantly 
wanted another and if possible a story-teller's opinion 
about it, and sent it off to my mother, asking her to read 
it first, and if it seemed to her to provide any species of 
entertainment, to think whether she could not manage to 
induce Mrs. Harrison (Lucas Malet) or Henry James, to 
cast a professional eye over it. She managed this with 
such success, that a few days afterwards she wrote to 
me to say that Henry James had consented to read it, and 
give his frank opinion. The packet she had already, on 
his consent, despatched to him. 

Now this MSS. which thus had reached the kindest 
man in the world, was written in a furious hurry and 
covered with erasures, that exploded into illegible inter- 
polations, and was indited in such a hand as we employ 
on a note that has to be dashed off when it is time already 
to go to the station. This was genially hinted at when 
late in November the recipient announced to me his judg- 



AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 273 

ment in the matter; for he prefaced his criticism with 
an apology for having kept it so long, and allowed that, 
in consentng to read and criticize, he had "rather over- 
estimated the attention I should be able to give to a 
production in manuscript of such substantial length. We 
live in such a world of type-copy to-day that I had taken 
for granted your story would come to me in that 
form. ..." 

I should like to call the attention of Mr. Max Beer- 
bohm, our national caricaturist and parodist, to this 
unique situation. Henry James at that time had lately 
evolved the style and the method which makes a deeper 
gulf between his earlier books and his later than exists be- 
tween different periods of the work of any other artist. 
Nearest perhaps in this extent and depth of gulf comes 
the case of the painter Turner, but the most sober and 
quiet example of his early period is not so far sundered 
from the most riotous of Venetian sunrises, as is, let us 
say, "Roderick Hudson" from "The Ivory Tower." Just 
about now Henry James had realized, as he told my 
mother, that all his previous work was "subaqueous": 
now, it seemed to him that he had got his head above 
water, whereas to those who adored his earlier work he 
appeared to have taken a header into some bottomless 
depth, where no plummet could penetrate. At this pre- 
cise moment when he had vowed himself to psychological 
analysis so meticulous and intricate that such action as 
he henceforth permitted himself in his novels had to be 
sifted and searched for and inferred from the motives 
that prompted it, he found himself committed to read 
a long and crabbed MS., roughly and voluptuously 
squirted on to the paper. With what sense of outrage as 
he deciphered it sentence by sentence must he have found 



274 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

himself confronted by the high-spirited but hare-brained 
harangues of my unfortunate heroine and her wordy 
friends! Page after page he must have turned, only to 
discover more elementary adventures, more nugatory and 
nonsensical dialogues. At the stage at which my story 
then was, I must tell the reader that the heroine was far 
more extravagant than she subsequently became: She 
was much pruned and tamed before she made her printed 
appearance. The greater part of her censored escapades 
have faded from my mind, but I still remember some 
occasion soon after her baby's death when she was dis- 
covered, I think by Jack,' doing a step-dance with her 
footman. It must all have seemed to Henry James the 
very flower and felicity of hopeless, irredeemable fiction 
and still he persevered. ... Or did he persevere 1 ? He 
wrote me anyhow the most careful and kindly of letters, 
following it by yet another, delicately and delightfully 
forbearing to quench the smoking flax. 

"I am such a fanatic myself," he writes in the earlier 
of these, "on the subject of form, style, the evidence of 
intention and meditation, of chiselling and hammering 
out in literary things that I am afraid I am rather a cold- 
blooded judge, rather likely to be offensive to a young 
story-teller on the question of quality. I'm not sure that 
yours strikes me as quite so ferociously literary as my 
ideal. . . . Only remember that a story is, essentially a 
form, and that if it fails of that, it fails of its mission. 
. . . For the rest, make yourself a style. It is by style we 
are saved." 

In case the reader has given a glance to Dodo, can he 
imagine a more wisely expressed opinion, that opinion, in 
fact, being no opinion at all ? Never by any possibility 
could that MS. have seemed to him worth the paper it 



AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCURSION 275 

was written on, or two minutes of his own time. With 
what a sigh of relief he must have bundled it into its 
wrapper again! 

I suppose I was incorrigible on this question of scrib- 
bling, for I was not in the least discouraged. But for the 
time the further adventures of the book were cut short 
by its author's Odysseys, for directly after Christmas my 
father and mother, Maggie, Lucy Tait and I started for 
Algiers, through which we were to journey together as 
far as Tunis. After that I was going on to Athens to 
spend the spring there studying at the British School of 
Archaeology, and it was with a light heart that I clapped 
Dodo, after this austere outing, back into a drawer again 
to wait till I could attend to her. 



CHAPTER XIII 



ATHENS AND DODO 



A CURIOUS incident marked that Algerian tour. 
Before going, my father told Queen Victoria of his 
intention, and she had at first been against his travelling 
so far afield, putting it to him that if his presence in 
England was urgently and instantly required, there might 
be some difficulty about his getting back in time. 
Whether she had in her mind the possibility of her own 
sudden death she did not explain. But presently she 
seemed to think that her reluctance that he should be 
so remote from England was unfounded : she changed her 
mind and wished him an interesting and delightful jour- 
ney. So from Algiers we went slowly eastwards visit- 
ing Constantine, Tebessa, Timeghad and Fort National 
on the way, our most remote point from Engla; 1 -via 
Tunis on the one side or (retracing our steps) Algiers 
on the other — being Biskra. We got there late one after- 
noon, and waiting for my father was a telegram from the 
Lord Chamberlain, announcing the death of Prince Ed- 
ward, Duke of Clarence, from influenza, and giving the 
date for the funeral. My father and I with guides and 
Bradshaws vainly attempted to find a route by which he 
could get back to England in time, but such route did 
not exist. Had this news come that morning he could 
have got back, so also could he, if the funeral had been 
arranged for the day after that for which it was fixed: 

276 



ATHENS AKD DODO 277 

but just here, at Biskra, and nowhere else throughout the 
journey was my father unable to return in time. It 
would perhaps be going too far to say that the Queen 
had anything in her mind definite enough to call a pre- 
monition; but the event happening just then was at least 
a most curious coincidence. ... A few hours afterwards 
a second telegram arrived, from the Prince of Wales who, 
with great thoughtfulness, begged him not to interrupt 
his tour. 

My father was thus able to realize one of the dearest 
dreams of his life, namely, to see with his mortal eyes 
the Carthage which he knew so intimately in connection 
with his lifelong study of Cyprian. His book on Cyprian 
which had occupied his leisure for some thirty years was 
now approaching completion, and long had he yearned 
to behold the ruined site where Cyprian had worked as 
bishop, to wander with his own feet over the shores and 
hills, which, all these years, had been so familiar to 
him; and that visit to Carthage had for him the sacred- 
ness of some pilgrimage for which his heart hungered. 
His own enthusiasm was so keen that I feel sure that he 
had no idea that his Mecca could be less to us than to 
him, and I have the vision of him kneeling on the site 
of some early Christian church, with his face all aglow 
with the long-deferred consummation. Just as his ap- 
preciation of a picture was mainly due to the nature of 
its subject, just as his pleasure in music was derived from 
the words which were sung to it, so now, as his diary 
records, he saw enchanting loveliness in that bare and 
featureless hill where Carthage once stood, for Cyprian's 
sake, and wondered at the want of perception which 
caused other travellers to find nothing admirable in that 
'bleak place. For once the classical associations of Car- 



278 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

thage, the Punic Wars, the subsequent Roman occupation 
had no lure for him. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, was 
the full moon among the lesser lights of the firmament. 

At Tunis I left the rest of them, going on my own 
special pilgrimage, and via Malta and Brindisi I came 
to the city already known to me by map and picture, and 
hallowed by some kind of predestined love. And just 
as my father was enchanted with that ugly little hill of 
Carthage because Cyprian had dwelt there, how was I 
not transported when above mean streets and miry ways 
I saw the sparkle of that marble crown of temples on the 
Acropolis? For indeed, from the time that Beesly had 
read us his Trojan Queen's Revenge, some idea, some 
day-dream of Athens had been distilled, drop by drop, 
into my blood. Whatever was lovely, whatever must be 
estimated and esteemed I always laid alongside some 
Greek standard. Not alone were things directly Greek, 
like the chorus of the (Edipus in Colonos, the chorus in 
Swinburne's Atalanta, the teachings of Middleton, the 
holy dead in the Street of Tombs tested by the Hellenic 
touchstone, but whatever moved my heart, the vision of 
Mary Anderson in the Winter s Tale, the joy of athletics, 
the austere crests of mountains, the forest of Savernake, 
the Passion-music of Bach, had been instinctively sub- 
jected to the same criterion. 

The material standard and symbol of that, by this 
subtle subconscious distillation, had always been the 
Acropolis, and on this crystalline January afternoon, it 
was mine to hurry along a tawdry Parisian boulevard, set 
with pepper trees, to see on one side the columns of the 
temple of Zeus, and on the other the circular Shrine of 
the Winds. On the right, as I knew well, I should soon 
pass the theatre of Dionysus and not turn aside for that 



ATHENS AND DODO 279 

even, and then would come the stoa of Asclepius and a 
great Roman colonnade, and for none of these had I a 
glance or a thought to spare, for over the sheer southern 
wall of the Acropolis there rose the south-west angle of 
the Parthenon. And then, with a reverence that was as 
sincere as love itself and not less ardent, I mounted the 
steps of the Propylsea, with the rebuilt shrine on the 
right of that fairy-presence, the Wingless Victory, who 
shed her pinions because for all time she was to abide in 
Athens ; and on the left was the great bastion wall stained 
to an inimitable russet by the winds from Salamis, and 
between the great Doric columns I passed, and there in 
front was a bare scraped hill-top, and glowing in the sun- 
set was the west front of the Parthenon, that serene abid- 
ing presence, set for a symbol of what Athens stood for, 
and, no less, of the eternal yearning of man for the glori- 
ous city of God. Behind rose the violet crown of hills, 
Hymettus and Pentelicus and Parnes. 

"Holy, holy, holy!" was the first message of it, and 
then like the dawn flowing down the cliffs of the Matter- 
horn, it illuminated all that on earth had the power to 
be kindled at its flame. Like the Sphinx it articulated 
its unanswerable riddle, and by its light it revealed the 
solution, and by its light it hid it again. The architect 
who had planned it, the sculptor who had decorated it, 
the hands that had builded it and formed the drums of its 
columns into monoliths of translucent stone had thrown 
themselves into the furnace of the creation that tran- 
scended all the wit and the cunning of its creators. They 
raised but a fog or a smoke of human endeavour, and 
from outside, no less than from the heart of their love, 
there dawned for them and for us the light invisible. 
Whatever love of beauty was in their souls was tran- 



280 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

scended and translated into stone; the glory of jubilant 
youth and of ridden stallions, of maidens who wove the 
mantle of the goddess, of priests and of the hierarchy of 
gods was but part of some world-offering to the austere 
and loving and perfect presence which they had instinc- 
tively worshipped, and, as in some noble trance, had set 
in symbol there. With what wonder must they have be- 
held the completed work of their hands, and, in their 
work, the indwelling of the power that was its consecra- 
tion. 

A tremendous impression, such as that first sight of the 
Parthenon undoubtedly made on me, would be a very 
doubtful gain, if it caused the rest of life to seem unin- 
teresting by comparison, for any kind of initiation must 
quicken rather than blunt the workaday trivial activities, 
and certainly in this case I lost no perception of the actual 
in the flash of the absolute. Athens at that time (to 
fuse together the impressions of this and subsequent 
years) was the most comic of European capitals; it was 
on the scale of some small German principality, and while 
aping the manner of Paris in a backwater, claimed descent 
from Pericles. It was opera-bouffe, seriously carried out, 
imagining itself in fact to be the last word in modern en- 
lightenment no less than in classical romance. It was 
with just that classical seriousness that the Olympic 
games were, a little later, reinaugurated here, and with 
all the gaiety of opera-bouffe that defeated competitors 
passionately argued with judges and umpires. At the 
top of the town came "Constitution Square," which com- 
prised an orange-garden and a parade-ground, where on 
festive occasions the regiments of Guards deployed and 
manoeuvred, quite, or nearly, occupying the centre of it: 
and there have these eyes seen the flower of the Greek 



ATHENS AND DODO 281 

army routed and dispersed by an irritated cab-horse, 
which, clearly possessed by the devil, galloped and 
wheeled and galloped again till the Guards had very 
prudently taken cover among the orange trees, for it was 
impossible to make any effective military display, when 
harassed by that enraged quadruped. Sometimes I think 
that this distressing scene was an adumbration of how, 
a few years later, that same army bolted through Thessaly 
on the approach of the Turks. "The host of hares" was 
the Turkish phrase for them, and Edhem Pasha, then 
commander-in-chief of the Ottoman army, described to 
me, when I was at Volo after the Turkish occupation of 
Thessaly, the battle of Pharsala. "We came over the 
hill," he said, without enmity and without contempt, 
"and we said f Sh-sh-sh' and we clapped our hands, and 
that was the battle of Pharsala." . . . How complete 
has been the regeneration of this versatile people may be 
gathered from their later campaigns against the same 
adversaries. 

On three sides of Constitution Square, were hotels and 
cafes and the residence of the Crown Prince Constantine 
subsequently cast by destiny for the ludicrous role of 
"King Tino." On the fourth side the Royal Palace, of a 
similarly pretentious and ugly style as that which looks 
over St. James's Park, presented a mean and complicated 
face to the steam-tramway that puffed through the top 
of the square on its way to Phaleron. A royal baby, that 
year or the next, had seen the light, and we foreign but 
loyal Athenians, what time a bugler stationed in the 
colonnade of the palace made all kinds of music, craned 
our necks and focussed our eyes to see the King come 
forth. But in nine cases out of ten, it was not King George 
who emerged but a perambulator pushed by an English 



282 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

nursery-maid. But that was the dynastic custom : when- 
ever a royal personage came forth from the palace, the 
bugler made all kinds of music, so that the inhabitants 
of Athens might, like good Nebuchadnezzarites, fall 
down and worship the pink little image. . . . Some- 
times, however, their loyalty obtained a more adult re- 
ward, for on Sunday afternoon King George would gen- 
erally go down to Phaleron in the steam-tram, and ob- 
serve the beauties of nature. On such occasions he was 
marvellously democratic, and would come trotting across 
the belt of gravel between the palace and the tram-lines 
in order not to keep his citizens waiting. There is no 
doubt that if he had attempted to do so, the tram would 
have gone without him, leaving him to follow by the 
next, or study the beauties of nature in his own garden. 
He was democratic also towards foreigners. A tourist 
staying in one of the respectable hotels round Constitu- 
tion Square, for instance, was quite at liberty to intimate 
to the Minister of his country that an audience with the 
King would be agreeable, and in due course some footman 
from the palace, in gorgeous well-worn livery, would 
bear a missive with a tremendous crown on the envelope 
which informed him that King George would give him 
an audience next day. Or, if you did not express your 
loyal desire, it would perhaps be intimated that it would 
be quite in order if you did so, and thereupon, on the 
appointed morning you would put on your evening dress- 
clothes (rather green in the sunlight), and a white tie, 
and a straw hat, and present yourself at the palace door. 
On seeing this apparition the bugler stationed there has 
been known to give one throaty blast, thinking that any- 
one so ridiculously attired must be a royal personage, 
then, catching the affrighted eye of the visitor, he recog- 



ATHENS AND DODO 283 

nized his mistake, and with an engaging smile, saluted 
instead. You took off your straw hat (or if it was winter 
your top-coat and bowler) and were ushered with a series 
of obeisances into a small bare room, furnished with a 
carafe of water. Then a door was thrown open, and, as 
in a dream, you advanced into a small apartment with a 
purple paper and gold stars upon it, and found the King. 
He always stood during these amazing interviews, and 
kept rising on tiptoe with his feet close together, till the 
instinct of unconscious mimicry made it impossible not to 
do the same, and he and you seesawed up and down, and 
talked for ten minutes about his friends in England. 
He had a long neck, and shoulders like a hock-bottle, and 
when he dipped them it was a sign that he had sufficiently 
enjoyed your society. He was very bald, and so also was 
the Crown Prince, who married the German Emperor's 
sister. Both father and son (though this will hardly be 
credited) wrote testimonials in praise of some fluid which, 
when rubbed on the head, produces or preserves a fine 
crop of hair. And if the hair-grease did them no good, as 
it apparently didn't, I hope there was some sort of palm- 
grease that made their testimonial worth their while. 

Queen Olga was Russian, daughter of the Grand Duke 
Constantine, a wonderfully beautiful woman, whom I 
had seen first when I came up from Marlborough for 
the Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887. She had an en- 
gaging habit when she came round the room at balls or 
after dinner in order to talk to the guests, of putting her 
hands on the shoulders of the women she was conversing 
with, and shoving them back into their seats, so that they 
should sit down without ceremony. Sometimes she 
would want to talk to two or three people together, and 
down they would go like ninepins, while she stood. Be- 



284 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

hind her came the King still playing seesaw, and behind 
him the Crown Prince, who did the same to the men he 
wanted to talk to, and a little while afterwards there was 
Prince George and Princess Marie, both putting people 
into their places. It was all very democratic, but also 
slightly embarrassing, because after large Prince George 
had pushed you back into a low chair, you had to crane 
your head up, as if you were talking to somebody on the 
top of the dome of St. Paul's, the dome inverted being 
represented by his tremendous and circular waistcoat. 
After him came Prince Nicholas, but he had always 
something terribly important and slightly broad, in the 
shape perhaps of a ''Limerick," to communicate. So as 
these could not be shouted, conversation was held on 
more reasonable levels. 

King George's family, as all the world knows, had 
made magnificent marriages. He was the brother of 
Queen Alexandra, and of the Dowager Empress of Russia, 
and his eldest son had brought as wife to Athens the 
German Emperor's sister, to whom, I suspect, these bugle- 
regulations were due. The "in-laws" consequently were 
often being bugled for, and the tram to Phaleron on a 
Sunday afternoon would now be a fine target for Bol- 
sheviks. The Crown Princess was constantly engaged 
during these years on her wifely duties, and the arrival 
of the Empress Frederick in Athens usually implied that 
there would soon be fireworks in Constitution Square. 
But when I write of her, there is no opera-bouffe atmos- 
phere that I can attempt or desire to reproduce, for tragic 
were her past years, bitter her present years, and grim 
agonies of mortal disease were already making ambush 
for her. During the three or four ensuing years, when, 
instead of being at the British School or at a hotel, I spent 



ATHENS AND DODO 285 

some months at the British Legation, where Sir Edwin 
Egerton was Minister, I found myself on strangely per- 
sonal terms with her. She had been a friend of an uncle 
of mine, who became a nationalized German after years 
of living in Wiesbaden, and starting from that, she 
talked with a curious unrestraint. Bitter little stinged 
remarks came out, "You are happy in being English"; 
or "When I come to London I am only a visitor." On 
one occasion I was left alone with her on a terrace above 
the outlying rooms at the Legation, and to my profound 
discomfort, she began pacing up and down with smothered 
ejaculations. Then quite suddenly she said to me, "But 
Willie is mad !" I suppose I idiotically looked as if this 
was some joke, and she shook her outstretched hand at 
me, "I mean that he is mad," she repeated. "Willie is 
mad." . . . Then quite suddenly, with the arrested 
movement of a bird, wounded to death in mid-air, she 
ceased from her tragic flight, and came to earth. "If 
you are going to bathe again at Phaleron," she said, with 
a laugh, alluding to an incident of the day before, "I 
must be sure there are no clothes on the beach, before I 
sit down to sketch. You came out of the water, and there 
was I . . ." 

Or the bugle sounded, and there was the unhappiest of 
the Czars looking very small beside his cousin Prince 
George. Or again, one afternoon, when, by perpetual 
permission, I was allowed to seek the shade and coolness 
of the palace gardens, I heard the trampling of foot-steps, 
and shrill expostulations, from behind a hedge of ole- 
ander. Round the corner came the originators of this 
disturbance. . . . King George seemed to have taken a 
dislike to his sister's hat, and had plucked it from her 
head and was kicking it along the garden path, while she 



286 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

followed remonstrating. "But it's an ugly hat," said 
he, delighted to find some kind of umpire, "and there- 
fore I took it and I kicked it, and she cannot wear it 
any more. . . ." (Was there ever anything so like the 
immortal Rose and the Ring?) "My hat!" said the 
injured owner tersely, as she recovered her hopelessly 
damaged property. . . . "So rude of you, George." 

My first spring in Greece was mostly spent out of 
Athens, for with another student I was put in charge of 
the British excavations at Megalopolis. All the plums 
had already been picked out of it, for the theatre had been 
completely cleared, and the excavation of the year before 
had laid bare the entire plan of the great Council hall, 
the Thersilion, built in the time of Epaminondas, so that 
this year excavation was equivalent to sitting on a wall 
while a lot of workmen removed tons of earth in which 
nothing could possibly be discovered. It was not thrill- 
ing, but at least one could incessantly talk to them in 
what purported to be modern Greek, until it became so. 
There had been considerable excitement about Mega- 
lopolis the year before, for the British excavators had 
thought they had triumphantly refuted the German 
theory, announced by Dr. Dorp f eld, that fourth century 
Greek theatres had no stage. They had unearthed steps 
and columns, which, they considered, proved the existence 
of a stage, and, rather prematurely, had announced their 
anti-German discovery in the Hellenic Journal with 
something resembling a crow of satisfaction. On which" 
this dreadful Dr. Dorpfeld came down from Athens with 
a note-book and a tape measure, and in a couple of hours 
in the pouring rain had proved quite conclusively, so 
that no further argument was possible, that the British, 
with a year to think about it, had quite misinterpreted 




E. F. BENSON, JET. 26 



[Page 287 



ATHENS AND DODO 289 

their own evidence, and demonstrated how what they had 
taken for a stage was merely a back wall. Their re- 
searches in fact had merely confirmed his theory. Then 
he rolled up his measure and went back to Athens. . . . 
So another and I cleaned up these rather depressing re- 
mains, and when that was done we hired mules and went 
a-wandering through the country and saw the spring 
"blossom by blossom" (even as Beesly had read) alight 
on the hills. Blossom by blossom, too, Greece itself, no 
longer pictured in photographs or bored for in books, 
opened its myriad lovelinesses, even as the scarlet ane- 
mone made flame in the thickets, and the nightingales 
"turned the heart of the night to fire" in the oleanders by 
the Eurotas. We visited Homeric Mycense, and Epi- 
daurus, the Harrogate of the fourth century B.C., and in 
archaeological intervals I speared mullet by the light of 
a flaming torch on moonless nights with the fishermen of 
Nauplia, and ate them for early breakfast, broiled on 
the sea-shore, before the sun was up. I crossed the Gulf 
of Corinth and went to Delphi, where the French school 
were beginning the excavations that were destined to yield 
more richly than any soil in Greece except the precinct 
at Olympia. There, too, I went, and if to me the Par- 
thenon had been a revelation of the glory of God, there I 
took my shoes from off my feet, and worshipped the glory 
of man, because the Hermes of Praxiteles "caring for the 
infant Dionysus," embodied, once and for all, the pos- 
sible, the ultimate beauty of man, even as the Louvre held 
the ultimate glory of woman. ... A few weeks more 
in Athens were busy with the record of the meagre re- 
sults from Megalopolis, and I left for England, know- 
ing in my very bones that Athens was in some subtle way 
my spiritual mother, so that on many subsequent jour- 



290 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

neys, as I went from England there, and from there back 
to England again, I travelled but from home to home, 
OLKodev OLKade. 

Dodo had been put back in her drawer, after her ex- 
pedition to Henry James: now for the second time I 
took her out and tasted her, as if to see whether she 
seemed to have mellowed like a good wine, or become 
sour like an inferior one, in which case I would very 
gladly have poured her on the earth like water, and 
started again. But I could not, reading her once more, 
altogether cast her off: she had certain gleams of vitality 
about her, and with my mother's connivance and help 
again I submitted her to a professional verdict. This 
time it was my mother's friend, Mrs. Harrison, known to 
our admiring family as "Lucas Malet," author of the 
adorable Colonel Enderby's Wife, who was selected to 
pronounce on my story, and again, I am afraid, it was 
without the slightest realization of this highway robbery 
on the time of an author that I despatched the book. 
Anyhow those two assaults on Henry James and Lucas 
Malet have produced in me a fellow-feeling for criminals 
such as I was a quarter of a century ago, so that now, 
when, . as occasionally happens, some light-hearted 
marauder announces that he or she (it is usually she) is 
sending me her manuscript, which she hopes I won't mind 
reading, and telling her as soon as possible exactly what 
I think of it, and to what publisher she had better send 
it (perhaps I would write him a line too) and whether 
the heroine isn't a little overdone (but her mother thinks 
her excellent), and would I be careful to register it when 
I return it, and if before next Thursday to this address, 
and if after next Friday to another, etc. etc., I try to 
behave as Lucas Malet behaved in similar circumstances. 



ATHENS AND DODO 291 

I do not for a moment say that I succeed, but I can still 
remember how pleasant it should seem, from the point of 
view of the aspirant scribbler, that somebody should be 
permitted to read what has been written with such rapture 
and how important it all is. . . . 

But I can never hope to emulate Lucas Malet's tact 
and wisdom in her genial, cordial, and honest reply (when 
she had had the privilege of wading through these sheets), 
for they still remain to me, who know her answer almost 
by heart, to be the first and the last word in the true 
theory of the writing of fiction. Her deft incisions dis- 
sected, from lungs and heart and outwards to the delicate 
fibre of the skin that protects and expresses the life within, 
the structure of stories, short or long, that are actually 
alive. First must come the "idea," the life that is to 
vitalize the complete animal, so that its very hair and 
nails are fed with blood. . . . And then, since I cannot 
possibly find words as apt and as sober as hers I will quote 
from the letters themselves. 

"First the idea, then the grouping, which is equivalent to our 
drama — then a search for models from whom to draw. Most 
young English writers — the artistic sense being a matter of ex- 
perience, not of instinct, with most of us — begin just the other 
way about. Begin with their characters . . . rummage about for 
a story in which to place them, and too often leave the idea out 
of the business altogether. . . . One evil consequence of this 
method — among many others — is that there is a distracting lack 
of completeness and ensemble in so much English work. The 
idea should be like the thread on which beads are strung. It 
shouldn't show, except at the two ends; but in point of fact it 
keeps the beads all together and in their proper relation." 

Then, to one already hugely interested in this admir- 
able creed of the art of fiction, Lucas Malet proceeded 



292 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

to a dissection, just and kind and ruthless, of the story 
as it stood. She hurt in order to heal, she cut in order that 
healthy tissue (if there was any) might have the chance 
to grow. She showed me by what process (if I applied it 
seriously and successfully) I might convert my Dodo- 
doll into something that did not only squeak when pressed 
in the stomach, and gave no other sign of vitality than 
closing its eyes when it was laid flat. In consequence, 
greatly exhilarated by this douche of cold water, I col- 
lected such fragments of an "idea" as existed, revised 
what I had written, and wrote (in pursuance of the 
"idea") the second volume, as it subsequently appeared, 
in those days when novels were originally issued in three 
or two volumes at the price of a guinea and a half or a 
guinea. I finished it that autumn, sent it to the publisher 
recommended by Lucas Malet, who instantly accepted it. 
It came out in the following spring, that of 1893. I was 
out in Greece again at the time, and though it was my 
first public appearance (since Sketches from Marlborough 
may be considered as a local phenomenon) I feel sure 
that from the time when, with trembling pride, I cor- 
rected the long inconvenient galley sheets that kept slip- 
ping on to the floor, I gave no further thought to it at 
all. Bad or good, I had done my best; what happened 
concerned me no more, for I was quite absorbed in the 
study of the precinct of Asclepios on the slopes of the 
Acropolis, in the life at Athens, and in a volume of short 
stories that I began to write with a pen still wet, so to 
speak, with the final corrections on the proof sheets of 
Dodo. She was done with, so far as I was concerned, and 
it was high time, now that I was twenty-five, to get on 
with something else, before the frosts of senility paralysed 
all further effort. 



ATHENS AND DODO 293 

For such a person as I happened to be, that, as I then 
believed and still believe, was the wisest resolution I 
could make. The habit of immediate activity, physically 
or mentally violent, had, from the days when butterflies, 
plants, athletics, friendship, Saturday Magazines were all 
put under contribution to feed the raging energies of life, 
become an instinct. If there was a kick left in my wholly 
boyish nature, it had become a habit to kick, and not to 
save the energy for any future emergency: if there was 
a minute to spare, somehow to use or enjoy it. To what 
use that minute and that kick were devoted, so I now 
see, did not particularly matter: the point was to kick 
for just that minute. No doubt there are other and ad- 
mirable uses to which energy may be put; some make 
reservoirs, into which they pour and store their vital force, 
and while it increases, screw down their sluice, and let 
the gathered waters rest and reflect. Such as these prob- 
ably achieve the most abiding results, for when they 
choose to raise their sluice, they can, by the judicious 
use of winch and shutter, continue to irrigate the field 
which they have determined to make fruitful, for a period 
that they can certainly estimate. They burn a steady 
unwavering candle which will always illuminate a fixed 
area, and from the areas which do not concern them they 
hide their ray and thus economize their wax and their 
wick. But how surely are there others who from their 
very nature are unable to construct their reservoirs or 
burn this one decorous candle. Whatever head of water 
there is, it must be instantly dispersed, whatever candle 
there is, it must be lit at both ends, and if that is not 
enough, it must be broken in half, and its new ends of 
wicks kindled and used for the exploration of some trump- 
ery adventure: "trumpery," that is to say, in the vocabu- 



294 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

lary of the wise and prudent, but how colossal in the 
sight of the wild-eyed adventurer. And just here, just 
where a moral lesson should be drawn showing the early 
decay and the untimely ^end of these spendthrifts of 
energy, the whole tendency of Nature lies in precisely the 
opposite direction to that in which natural and moral 
economy ought to tend, for it is the careful who grow 
early old, and the careful investor of energy who declares 
bankruptcy, and retires in middle life to the club win- 
dows, where he shows a bald head to St. James's Street, 
and a sour visage to the waiters. Somehow so it most 
inexorably seems, those who spend, have ; those who save, 
lack. Not that the spender could, by the laws and in- 
stincts of his nature, have done otherwise than court 
bankruptcy : not that the investor could have done other- 
wise than court affluence. But the one careful candle, 
as a matter of experience, gets blown out, and the irrele- 
vant candle-ends continue to flare. . . . 

So, after this second visit to Greece, I came home to 
find to my incredulous and incurious surprise, that in the 
interval I had become, just for the focus of a few months, 
famous or infamous. One of those rare phenomena, less 
calculable than the path of a comet, which periodically is 
to destroy the world, had occurred, and there was a 
"boom" in Dodo, and no one was more astonished than 
the author, when his mother met him arriving by the 
boat train at Victoria, and hinted at what was happening. 
All sorts of adventitious circumstances aided it: it was 
thought extremely piquant that a son of the Archbishop 
of Canterbury should have written a book so frankly 
unepiscopal, and quite a lot of ingenious little paragraph- 
ists invented stories of how I had read it aloud to my 
father and described his disconcertedness : the title-role 



ATHENS AND DODO 295 

and other characters were assigned to various persons 
who happened then to be figuring in the world, but apart 
from all these adventitious aids, this energetic and trivial 
experiment had — in those ancient days — a certain novelty 
of treatment. There were no explanations ; whatever lit- 
tle life its characters were possessed of, they revealed by 
their own unstinted speech. That, as I have already ex- 
plained, had been the plan of it in my mind, and trie 
.execution, whatever the merits of the plan might be, was 
in accordance with it. It went through edition after 
edition, in that two-volume form, price a guinea (against 
which shortly afterwards the libraries revolted) and all 
the raging and clamour, of course, only made it sell the 
more. It had received very scant notice in the Press 
itself; what (as always happens) made it flourish so 
furiously was that people talked about it. 

But its success apart from the delightful comedy of 
such a first act to its author, led on to a truly violent situ- 
ation when the curtain rose again, for the critics, justly 
enraged that this rare phenomenon called a "boom" 
should not have been detected and heralded by their 
auguries and by them damned or deified, laid aside a 
special pen for me, ready for the occasion when I should 
be so imprudent as to publish another novel; and they 
all procured a large bottle of that hot ink which Dante 
dipped for, 

When his left hand i' the hair of the wicked, 
Back he held the brow and pricked its stigma 
Bit unto the live man's flesh for parchment, 
Loosed him, laughed to see the writing rankle, 

and since they were proposing to "let the wretch go 
festering" through London, they read up Macaulay's re- 



296 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

view of Mr. Robert Montgomery's poems to see how it 
was done. If they had not noticed Dodo, they would at 
least notice her successor. Indeed the fairy godmother 
who presents a young author at his public christening 
with a boom, brings him a doubtful gift, for when next I 
challenged attention all these little Macaulays and 
Dantes uncorked their hot ink, and waited pen in hand 
till Mr. Methuen sent them their "advance copies." Then, 
saying "one, two, three — go," they all produced on the 
birth-morning of the unfortunate book columns and 
columns of the most blistering abuse that I remember 
ever beholding in God-fearing journals. This blasted 
infant was a small work called The Rubicon, now so 
completely forgotten that I must ask the reader to take 
my word for it that it was quite a poor book. It was not 
even very, very bad: it was just poor. Critics have hun- 
dreds of poor books submitted to their commiserated 
notice, and they are quite accustomed to that, and tell 
the public in short paragraphs that the work in ques- 
tion is "decidedly powerful," or "intensely interesting" 
or "utterly futile," and there is an end of it as far as they 
are concerned. Had this blasted infant been a first book 
it would naturally have received no more than a few rude 
little notices, and perhaps a few polite little notices. But 
as it was the successor to the abhorred comet it was 
concertedly singled out for the wrath of the Olympians. 
The candidatus exercitus of the entire Press went forth 
with howitzers and Maxims (in both senses), with can- 
nons of all calibres, with rifles and spears and arrows and 
sharp tongues to annihilate this poor little May-fly. That 
I am not exaggerating the stupendous character of this 
fusillade can be shown from a few extracts. In those 
days I used to take in Press-cuttings, and among a heap 



ATHENS AND DODO 297 

of more precious relics in a forgotten box I came across 
the other day a packet of these, which contained such 
flowers as I could not leave to blush unseen, and I picked 
and here present a little nosegay of them. 

(1) The Pall Mall Gazette. (The Rubicon, E. F. 
Benson.) 

"Mr. Benson's New Play. 

Dramatis Persons. 

Eshumee Dodo. Madonna de Clapham. 
Lord Anaemia. Jelly Fish. 

Donjuans (sic). Vulgarities. Indecencies. 
Time, The Middle Classes. Place, Le Pays Inconnu. 

Mise en scene, Fluff." 

Then follows a short analysis, not so fragrantly precious, 
and then comes comment. 

"All the gutter-elements of Dodo are rehashed and warmed up 
again with no touch of novelty or improvement or chastisement. 
. . . The Lives of the Bad are interesting assuredly . . . but 
then they must be living and bad, and these pithless people are 
only galvanic [galvanized*?] and vulgar. We do not wish to be 
hard on Mr. Benson. Let him give three years to investigating 
the distinctions between good writing and bad writing, between 
wit and vulgarity . . . and then we should not be surprised if he 
produced something worth finding serious fault with." 

(2) The (late) Standard. (A column and a half.) 

"Taking the book as a whole, it is an absolute failure. As a 
rule, the writing is forced and uneasy, the reflections confused or 
lumbering. The character-drawing is crude and uncertain. It is 
emphatically one of those books that are sensual, earthly and 
unwholesome," 



298 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

(3) Vanity Fair. (One column.) 

"Of style he has little : of wit he has no idea ... of plot there 
is less in The Rubicon than is generally to be found in a penny 
novelette : of knowledge of Society (if he have any) Mr. Benson 
shows less here than is usually possessed by the nursery-gov- 
erness ; and in grammar he seems to be as little expert as he is in 
natural science : of which his knowledge seems to equal his smat- 
tering of the Classics . . . ill-named, full of faults, betraying 
much ignorance of manners and unknowledge [sic] of human na- 
ture : a book, indeed, compact of folly and slovenliness : guiltless 
of any real touch of constructive art ; without form and void : a 
book of which I fear that I have made too much." 

(4) Daily Chronicle. (One column.) 

"A Puzzle for Posterity. 

What will the critical students of, say, two generations ahead, 
make of the fact that in the spring of 1894 the newspapers of 
London treated the appearance of a new novel by Mr. E. F. Ben- 
son as an event of striking importance in the world of books? 
The thought that death will rid us of the responsibility for that 
awkward explanation lends an almost welcome aspect to the 
grave. . . . 

That The Rubicon is the worst-written, falsest and emptiest of 
the decade, it would be, perhaps, too much to say. In these days 
of elastic publishing standards and moneyed amateurs, many 
queer things are done, and Mr. Benson's work is a shade better 
than the poorest of the stuff which would-be novelists pay for the 
privilege of seeing in print. ... A certain interest attaches, no 
doubt, to the demonstration which it affords that a young gentle- 
man of university training can meet the female amateurs on their 
own ground, and be every whit as maudlin and absurd as they 
know how to be. But the sisterhood have an advantage over him 
in the fact that they can spell. . . . There are a score of glaring 
grammatical errors, to say nothing of the clumsiness and incompe- 
tency which mark three sentences out of five throughout the book. 



ATHENS AND DODO 299 

Bad workmanship might be put aside as the fault of inexperience, 
if the young man had an actual story to tell . . . but there is 
nothing of that sort here. . . . The heroine is from time to time 
led over to as near [sic] the danger line of decency as the libraries 
will permit. She is made to utter several suggestive speeches, and 
once or twice quite skirts the frontier of the salacious. . . ." 

(5) The World. (Length unknown : I cannot find the 
second half of it.) 

"But, alas ! Eva Hayes in The Rubicon is quite as vulgar, quite 
as blatant in the bad taste she is pleased to exhibit on every oc- 
casion, as her predecessor Dodo, and is dull beyond description 
into the bargain. From beginning to end of the two volumes 
there is not one spark or gleam of humour, or sign of true obser- 
vation and knowledge of humanity." 

(6) The (late) St. James's Budget. (Six columns.) 

"Another Unbirched Heroine. 

It might have been supposed that the son of an Archbishop was 
hardly the sort of person to shine in this kind of literature, but 
Mr. Benson has taught us better than that. Yet our thanks are 
due to him for one thing : his book consists of only two volumes ; 
it might have been in three. . . . 

How they Mate in the 'Hupper Suckles.' . . . 
Languour, Cigarettes and Blasphemies. . . . 

We conclude this enthusiastic appreciation of Mr. Benson with 
the bold avowal that we regard The Rubicon as almost truly per- 
fect of its kind, and probably unsurpassable. Any one of Shake- 
speare's most remarkable gifts may be found, perhaps, in equal 
measure in the writings of some minor author ; but none ever had 
such a union of so many as he. So it is with Mr. Benson. A 
school-girl's idea of 'plot,' a nursery-governess's knowledge of the 
world ; a gentleman's 'gentleman's' views of high life ; an under- 
graduate's sense of style and store of learning; a society para- 
graphist's fine feeling and good taste ; a man-milliner's notion of 
creating character : of each of these you may find plenty of evi- 



300 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

dence in the novels of the day; but nowhere else — unless it be 
in Dodo — will they all be found welded into one harmonious 
unity as they are here ! . . ." 

Here is but the most random plucking of these blos- 
soms, but what a nosegay ! The flower from Vanity Fair 
grew of course from the same root as that from the St. 
James's Budget, and this is interesting as showing the 
excellent co-ordination between these different attacks. 
As a Press-campaign on an infinitesimal scale, I give the 
foregoing as a classical example. No book, however bad, 
could possibly have called forth, in itself, so combined 
an onslaught : every gun in Grub Street was primed and 
ready and sighted not on The Rubicon at all, but on the 
author of Dodo. But herein is shown the inexpediency 
of using up all your ammunition at once, on so insignifi- 
cant a target. It was clear that if the respectable jour- 
nals of London made so vigorous an offensive, that offen- 
sive had to be final, and the war to be won. Still more 
clear was it that, if this was not a preconcerted, malicious 
and murderous campaign not on a particular book, but 
on an individual, the entire columns of the London Press 
must henceforth be completely devoted to crushing in- 
ferior novels. The Rubicon was but one of this innumer- 
able company: if the Press had determined to crush in- 
ferior novels, it was clear that for a considerable time 
there would be no room in its columns for politics, or 
sport or foreign news or anything else whatever. Not 
even for advertisements, unless we regard such attacks 
as being unpaid advertisements. . . . 

So there was no more firing for the present, and it was 
all rather reminiscent of the tale of how Oscar Wilde 
went out shooting, and fell down flat on the discharge of 
his own gun. 



ATHENS AND DODO 301 

The Press, after that, had nothing more to shoot at 
me, for all their heaviest shells had been launched; so 
the blighted author walked off, as Mr. Mantalini said, 
as comfortable as demnition, and proceeded vigorously 
to write The Babe, B.A. and other tranquil works, just 
as if he had not been blown into a thousand fragments. 

The Press-notices, in fact, from which these six ex- 
tracts are taken, were a huge lark, and one day I found 
my father (who so far from summoning family councils 
on the subject never spoke to me about my public scrib- 
blings at all) wide-eyed and absorbed in one of these con- 
temporary revilings. Suddenly he threw his head back 
with a great shout of laughter, and slapped me on the 
back. "You've got broad enough shoulders to stand that 
sort of thing," he said. "Come along, are the horses 
ready 1 ?" and out we went riding. But less humorous 
were certain private kicks which I got (and no doubt 
deserved) from less ludicrous antagonists. Of these the 
chief, and the most respected both then and now, must be 
nameless. He had been so hot in appreciation and so cor- 
dial over Dodo, politely observing in it a "high moral 
beauty" that I find him (in this same forgotten box) writ- 
ing to me, before the appearance of The Rubicon, in these 
words a propos of the growing public taste for realism: 

"The public in the next generation will be what you and one 
or two others like you choose to make it. Good work in any style 
gives that style vogue. . . . It's ever when you are most serious 
you are at your best. Work, work and live." 

Well, I worked and lived like the devil for strenuous- 
ness. Then The Rubicon made its appearance, and the 
same friend took a blistering pen instead : 



302 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

"If anything could possibly give a more serious blow to your 
chances of future and legitimate success than the publication of 
The Rubicon, it would be to bring out within three or four years 
another novel. ... It does not seem to me that you have formed 
the slightest conception of the true situation. It is this. Your 
first book, from accidental and even parasitic causes — things that 
were not in the book at all — enjoyed an entirely abnormal and 
baseless success. You have now to begin again, and for several 
years the public will certainly not listen to you as a novelist." 

For the life of me, I cannot now, reading these ex- 
plosive records over again, determine whether I could 
have gained anything by paying the smallest" attention to 
them. Logically, it was impossible to do so, for they 
clearly were directed, as I have said, not against this 
wretched old Rubicon, but against the person who had 
dared to capture success with Dodo. Rightly or wrongly, 
it seemed to me that vituperation so violent could not be 
regarded as other than comic. If I was a nursery-gover- 
ness and a man-milliner, and a gentleman's gentleman it 
was all very sad, but I was less overwhelmed because I 
was already terribly interested in the Babe, B.A. and not 
at all interested in the St. James's Budget, except as a 
humorous publication, which the Babe, B.A. tried to be, 
too. And then there were delightful plans ahead; this 
autumn Maggie was to come out to Athens with me, and 
we were to go on to Egypt together, and have a Tre- 
mendous Time. . . , 



CHAPTER XIV 



ATHENS AND EGYPT 



SO there was Athens again, with its bugles and its 
Royal Babies, and its eternal Acropolis, which cus- 
tom never staled. Maggie jumped into the Hellenic 
attitude at once, adoring the adorable, filling with the 
laughter of her serious appreciation the comedy of the 
life there, enjoying it all enormously, and finding ecstatic 
human interest in Oriental situations. One day the M.P. 
for Megalopolis appeared in Athens, and so, of course, I 
asked him to tea in the Grand Hotel, and Maggie put in 
some extra lessons in modern Greek with the English 
vice-consul, in order that a tongue-tied female should not 
mar the entertainment. The M.P.'s remarks were mostly 
unintelligible to her, and these I translated back for her 
benefit, and if she could find a phrase that fitted she 
slowly enunciated it, and if not she said to him, syllable 
by syllable, "I should like to see your wife and children, 
but we are going to Egypt." All the "circles" in Athens 
embraced at once her cordial and eager humanity. She 
sketched all morning, and when I came to the rendezvous, 
there would be a dozen young Greek urchins round her 
canvas, to whom, as she washed in a lucent sky, she made 
careful and grammatical remarks. . . . She captivated 
the heart of the archaeologists, and Dr. Dorpfeld who had 
proved himself so fatal to the theories of the British 
School at Megalopolis, addressed his most abstruse argu- 

303 



304 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

ments to her as he announced that "die Enneakrounos, ich 
habe gewiss gefunden" when he gave his out-of-door lec- 
tures. The English Minister, Sir Edwin Egerton, used 
to wrap her shawl round her, as she left the Legation 
after dinner, saying, "Now you look like a Tanagra 
figure," and the Queen asked her in strict confidence, 
whether the English aristocracy really behaved as her 
brother said they behaved in that odd book called Dodo. 
The answer to that was given in a performance we got 
up, ostensibly for the amusement of the English gover- 
nesses in Athens at Christmas, of the Duchess of Bays- 
water. Of course we got it up primarily because we 
wanted to act, and then it grew to awful proportions. 
The English Mediterranean Fleet happened to come into 
the Pirseus about then, and Admiral Markham asked if 
a contingent of two hundred blue-jackets or so might 
stand at the back of the English governesses. On which, 
the style of the entertainment had to be recast altogether, 
and we bargained that, if they came the performance 
should consist of two parts. The first part should be 
supplied by sailors, who would dance hornpipes, and 
sing songs, and the second part should consist of The 
Duchess of Bay swat er. That was agreed, and we engaged 
a large public hall. 

Then Regie Lister who was a Secretary of Legation, 
let slip to the Crown Princess that we were getting up 
an entertainment for (and with) sailors and English 
governesses, and she, under promise of discretion as re- 
gards her relatives, was allowed to be one of the English 
governesses. With truly Teutonic perfidiousness, she 
informed all the Kings and Queens then in Athens what 
was going on, and just as the curtain was about to go 
up for The Duchess of Bay swat er a message came from 



ATHENS AND EGYPT 305 

the palace that the entire host of royalties was then 
starting to attend it. And so there was a row of Kings 
and Queens and ten rows of English governesses, and a 
swarm of English sailors. But we refused to cut out a 
topical allusion to the Palace bugles. 

And at precisely this point, the epoch of those absurd 
theatricals, the sparkle and comedy of Athenian existence 
was overshadowed or enlightened for me by the birth of 
a great friendship. Regie Lister had the greatest genius 
for friendship of any man I ever met ; no one, not even 
Alfred Lyttelton, had a finer gift or a more irresistible 
charm for men and women alike. The two, extraordi- 
narily dissimilar in most respects, were identical in this, 
that they compelled others to love them, because they 
loved so magnificently themselves. Alfred Lyttelton, 
for all his exuberant virility, had the feminine quality 
of giving himself instead of taking, which is what I mean 
by magnificent love, and Regie's genius in friendship 
sprang from precisely the same abandonment. There 
they diverged north and south, for Regie had practically 
none of the manliness that was so characteristic of the 
other. But he had superbly the qualities of his defects ; 
in matters of intellect, the direct masculine attack was 
represented by intuition and diplomacy and extreme 
quickness, and in matters of affection by a certain robust 
tenderness, quite devoid of sentimentality. All mankind, 
whether male or female, is compounded of both sexes : 
the man without any womanly instincts would be a mere 
monster; the woman without any grit of manliness in 
her, a mere jelly-fish, and in Regie's nature the woman 
had a large share. One quality supposed to be a defect 
of women rather than men he was quite without : he had 
no notion whatever of "spite," and was incapable of tak- 



306 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

ing revenge on anyone who had annoyed or crossed him. 
Most shining of all among his delightful gifts was his 
instinct of seeing the best in everyone. Wherever he 
went in his diplomatic posts, Athens, Constantinople, 
Copenhagen, Rome, Paris, or Tangiers, he found, with- 
out the least "setting to work" about it, that there never 
was so heavenly a place, nor so delightful an entourage. 
At heart he was really Parisian; that city, with its keen 
kaleidoscopic gaiety, its intellectual and artistic atmos- 
phere, dry and denned as its own air, suited him best, 
but this instinct to find everyone with whom he came in 
contact delightful, brought out, as was natural, all that 
there was delightful in them, and thus his instinct was 
justified. He was incapable of being bored for more 
than a couple of minutes together, and would have found 
something that could be commuted into cheerfulness in 
the trials of Job. Whether he liked a person or not, he 
always gave his best, not with the idea of making himself 
popular, but because that was the natural expression of 
his temperament. His amiability made the ripe plums 
easily drop for him, but when he had determined to get 
something which did not come off its stalk for the wishing, 
he had indomitable perseverance, and that rather rare 
gift of being able to sit down and think until a method 
clarified itself. 

With him, then, I struck up a friendship which dis- 
pensed with all the preliminaries of acquaintanceship: 
there was no gradual drawing together about it, it leaped 
into being, and there it remained, poised and effortless. 
Often during the ensuing years after he had left Athens 
and was at his post in some European capital, we did 
not meet for months together, but when the meeting 
came, relations were taken up again, owing to some flame- 



ATHENS AND EGYPT 307 

like quality in him which warmed you as soon as you got 
near him, without break or sense of there having been a 
break. Morning by morning he came down to the mu- 
seum where I was studying sculpture with his paints and 
sketching-block, and made the most admirable pictures 
of some Greek head; we took excursions round Athens 
up Hymettus or Pentelicus, we usually dined together 
at some house of an evening, where he made cosmopoli- 
tan diplomatists act charades or play some childish and 
uproarious game. Best of all was it to leave Athens, 
and wander three or four days at a time in the Pelopon- 
nese. We cast pennies into the Styx, we lost our way 
and our mules and their drivers on the slopes of Cyllene, 
and were rescued by a priest who tucked up his skirts, 
and hurled huge stones at the savage shepherd-dogs; we 
slept in indescribable inns, where were all manner of 
beasts, we bathed in the Eurotas, and lay that night 
among goats in a shed on the Langarda Pass, and the 
sorriest surroundings were powerless to abate Regie's en- 
joyment. And on one unique and memorable day we 
hunted for the temple at Bassae in a thick fog, and almost 
despaired of finding it, when out of the heart of the 
enshrouding mist there came the roar of a great wind that 
tore the fog into tatters, and lo, not a hundred yards 
away was the grave grey temple. The flying vapours 
vanished, chased like frightened sheep along steaming 
hillsides and through the valleys below, and all the 
Peloponnese swam into sight, from the Gulf of Corinth 
to the western sea, and from the west to the bays of 
the south, and from the south to the waters of Naup- 
lia. . . . Did two more ecstatic pilgrims ever behold the 
shrine of Apollo? 



308 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

For the next three winters slices of Egypt were sand- 
wiched between visits to Greece. I started with Greece, 
went on with Maggie, or on other occasions joined her 
at Luxor, and came back to Greece, living, after Regie's 
departure for Constantinople, at the Legation with Sir 
Edwin Egerton, the most hospitable of mankind. But 
the magic of Egypt, potent and compelling as it was, was 
a waving of a black wand compared to the joyful spell of 
Greece. "All who run may read; only run" was the 
Greek injunction: "All who read must run away" seemed 
the equivalent in the Nilotic incantation. To get under 
the spell of Greece implied a rejuvenation into a world 
that was like dawn on dewdrops and gave so sunny an 
answer to the "obstinate questionings" that there was no 
need even to ask what the riddle had been. 

"All is beauty, 
And knowing this is love, and love is duty, 
What further can be sought for or declared?" 

That glittered from the fading shores of Attica, and then 
after a few miles of sea, there arose the low and sinister 
coast, and as you began to guess at the mystery of the 
desert-bounded land you quaked at the conclusion. There 
was something old and evil there and as tired as Eccle- 
siastes : it preached Vanitas Vanitatum instead of singing 
the sunny love-spell of Greece, and while its mouth 
mumbled the syllables, its relentless hands reared the 
pyramids which must stand for ever to the astonishment 
of the world as a monument of unimaginative construc- 
tion and lost labour. There too it set the Sphinx whose 
totally blank and meaningless face, innocent of any riddle 
except that of its own soullessness, defies the rising glory 



ATHENS AND EGYPT 309 

of the sun and the moon of lovers to instil any spark of 
animation into its stony countenance. What monsters 
to an Attic pilgrim were these gods conceived not in the 
kindly image of humanity but as out of some incestuous 
menagerie! Here was no deep-bosomed Hera, queen of 
gods and men, for the royalty of motherhood; no 
helmeted Athene for the royalty of wisdom; no Aphrodite 
for the excellence of love sent her herald Eros to an- 
nounce her epiphany from the wine-dark sea. The 
Egyptian artificers hewed no images of joy and mirth, 
they set no Faun nor Satyr dancing in the twilight, no 
Hermes held the winds in the flower-like pinions of 
his heels, or nursed the god after whom the Bacchantes 
revelled, with the smile that so quivered on his mouth 
that next moment surely the vitality with which he 
tingled, would break through that momentary marble 
arrest. Far other were these incongruous composite di- 
vinities, all as dead as a hangman's noose, all incapable 
of summoning up one quiver of a kindly mirth. As by 
some disordered dream of a religious maniac the hawk- 
faced god had a cobra for symbol of his divinity; a cow 
or a cat or a lion had mated with a man and the offspring 
sat there, bleak and appalling, to be worshipped. And 
in matter of material, for the glow of the white Pentelic 
that holds the sunshine in solution within, even as a 
noble vintage is redolent of Provencal summers, these 
monstrous forms were presented in dead black basalt, a 
frozen opacity of ink. 

Into these tight-fisted inexorable hands were given 
the jail-keys of death. Egypt was ever the land of graves, 
Memento Mori, the sad gospel of its religion. A little 
honey, a little pulse, blue-glazed images of slaves who 
might still toil for their master in that dim underworld, 



310 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

images of food in the chambers of the dead, were all 
that the pious could provide for the desolate whimpering 
soul, feeble as a moth, that went forth on its lonely- 
journey through dubious twilight. The crowns and the 
sceptres, the gold and precious stones that were buried 
with the kings were but a mockery to them of all that 
they had quitted; the mightiest monument that Pharaoh 
had raised was no more than a flickering beacon behind 
him as he trod the dark passage, which cast in front the 
shadow of the man that he had been. The gigantic and 
hopeless art, bound hand and foot by the fetters of 
hieratic tradition could do no more than multiply mono- 
liths, incredulous of its own greatness and untinged with 
the living colour of humanity. Yet out of this mere 
piling up of dead on dead there arose a musty necromantic 
magic, awful and old and corrupt, that sat like a vulture 
on the sandbanks and was wafted, eternally fecund, 
down the waters of the Nile. All the way up to Luxor, 
where we settled down for a time, through the splendour 
of noon and the last ray of sunset that turns the stream 
into a sheet of patinated bronze, there was present that 
underlying sense of woe; and to this day my nightmares 
are set on the Nile in the sweet scent of bean fields 
beneath the waving of mimosa and of palms, where, by 
the terrible river there crouches some abominable granite 
god. 

I have given a wrong notion of this curious psychic 
horror if I have represented it as interfering with enjoy- 
ment and interest. It lay couched and in concealment, 
seldom stirring, and belonged I suppose to that sub- 
conscious world which, somewhere within us, is absorbed 
in its own constructive energies, and only rarely lets news 
of itself rise, like a bubble through dark water, into our 



ATHENS AND EGYPT 311 

controlled and effective consciousness. But cell by cell 
was stored with its bitter honey, and my bees must have 
been busy, for when a few years later I began to write 
a book called The Image in the Sand I found the combs 
full and ready for my despoiling. How such invention 
as is implied in writing a book, exercises itself in others, 
I do not know, but I have a very clear idea of my own 
case. The material, the stuff out of which the threads 
are woven, or, if you will, the stock-pot out of which the 
pottage comes, has long been simmering and stewing be- 
fore the planning, the conscious invention begins. These 
two stages, so I take it, are widely severed from each 
other; the storing and the stewing have long preceded this 
rummage and inspection of what the author wants for his 
purpose. But there is, practically always, a second pot 
on the fire, subconsciously stewing, the contents of which 
concern him not at all, while he is exercising such culinary 
art as may be his over the contents of the first. Thus, 
while subconsciously I was gathering and shredding into 
this second pot, some of these secret and bitter herbs of 
Egypt to be used years afterwards, my conscious cooking 
powers were altogether absorbed with the stuff I had long 
before collected in Greece. In other words, I was busy 
with writing The Vintage while my subconscious mind 
was just as busy on its own office of making ready for 
The Image in the Sand. Every morning, and all morn- 
ing, as we went up the Nile in the post-boat, I used to 
carry book and pen and ink to some sequestered corner 
where the sun beat full on me, and, while the sandbanks 
and the vultures and the wicked old spell of Egypt were 
working on my subconscious mind, I exuded on to paper 
what I had captured of the sunnier spell of Greece. I 
fancy that this must be a mental process common to 



312 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

most people, and that nobody writes of the interests and 
experiences which at the moment absorb him. They have 
to be kept and stored and stewed before they are fit for 
use; the harvest in fact has long been completed before 
the grain is ground, or before the baker, later still, is at 
his oven. 

Every winter then, for those three years, and indeed for 
one year more, tragic and final — I went across to Egypt 
from Greece, firm in the protection of the sunny gods 
when I started, and hastening to swing the incense again 
when I returned. And I must surely have been inocu- 
lated with the poison of the darker deities, so that for 
two years I was immune from their attacks, or perhaps 
Maggie's excavations in the temple of Mut in Karnak 
were so thrilling and surprising that "the plague was 
stayed," or perhaps I made some truce and reconciliation 
with the hawk-faced gods and the cats and the baboons, 
or perhaps (as seemed most probable of all) I had im- 
agined a vain thing when for the first time I thought that 
the iron of these malignant conceptions had entered into 
my soul, for the early months of the new year in 1895 
and 1896 were weeks of incessant exhilaration, the glory 
of which was this concession, given to Maggie by the 
Ministry of Antiquities, that she might conduct the exca- 
vation of a temple. 

Did ever an invalid plan and carry out so sumptuous 
an activity"? She was wintering in Egypt for her health, 
being threatened with a crippling form of rheumatism; 
she was suffering also from an internal malady, depress- 
ing and deadly : a chill was a serious thing for her, fatigue 
must be avoided, and yet with the most glorious contempt 
of bodily ailments which I have ever seen, she continued 
to employ some amazing mental vitality that brushed dis- 



ATHENS AND EGYPT 313 

abilities aside, and, while it conformed to medical orders, 
crammed the minutes with such sowings and reapings as 
the most robust might envy. When I got to Egypt in 
the first of these three years she had already obtained 
permission to excavate the temple of Mut in the horse- 
shoe lake at Karnak, with the proviso that the museum at 
Gizeh was to claim anything it desired out of the finds ; 
she had got together sufficient funds to conduct a six 
weeks' exploration with a moderate staff of workers, and 
there she was with her fly-whisk and her white donkey, 
using a dozen words of Arabic to the workers with aston- 
ishing effect. She had begun by trenching the site diago- 
nally in order to cut across any walls that were covered by 
the soil, and another diagonal soon gave the general 
plan of the unknown temple. All the local English 
archaeologists were, so to speak, at her feet, partly from 
the entire novelty of an English girl conducting an exca- 
vation of her own, but more because of her grateful and 
enthusiastic personality, and M. Naville, who was en- 
gaged at Deir-el-Bahari across the river, came and sat 
like a benignant eagle on a corner stone, while Mr. New- 
berry deciphered some freshly exposed inscription. I was 
given a general supervision, with the object of discover- 
ing the most economical method of clearing, of arranging 
the "throws" of earth (so that those going to the chuck- 
ing heap should not use the same path as those returning 
with empty baskets, a plan which entailed collisions and 
much pleasant conversation between the workmen who 
were going to and fro) and with making a plan to scale 
of the temple. A friend of Maggie's kept an eye wide 
open for possible thefts of small objects, but the genius, 
the organizer, the chairman of it all was Maggie. After 
a morning there, she had to get back to Pagnon's Hotel, 



314 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

lunch quietly and rest afterwards, but presently she 
would be out again, cantering on her white donkey with- 
out fatigue owing to her admirable seat, with a tea-basket 
on the crupper, and Mohammed the devoted donkey-boy 
trotting behind with encouraging cries so that the donkey 
should not lapse into that jog-trot which was so bad for 
tea-things. At sunset, the work was over, and we made 
our leisurely way back to the hotel. Maggie rested a 
tired body before dinner, but exercised an indefatigible 
mind, working at what was familiarly known as "her 
philosophy," which eventually took shape in her book, 
The Venture of Rational Faith, or scribbling at one of 
the charming animal stories, which she published later 
under the title of Subject to Vanity. Then after dinner, 
the old habits reasserted themselves and we played games 
with pencil and paper, producing poetical answers to 
preposterous questions or rooking each other at picquet. 
Each Saturday, she jingled out with money-bags to the 
temple of Mut, and paid her workmen, while her native 
overseer checked the tale of piastres, and waved the whisk 
to keep the flies off his mistress. 

Sometimes there were days off, when one of the three 
was left in charge, and the two others went far through 
the fertile land, or ferrying across the Nile, spent the day 
with M. Naville at Deir-el-Bahari to see what fresh 
sculptured wall had been reclaimed from the blown sand 
of the desert, showing the pictured ivory and gold which 
the expedition of Queen Hatasoo had brought back from 
the mysterious land of Punt ; or we crawled dustily into 
some newly discovered malodorous tomb in the valley 
where the kings of Egypt were buried, or visited Professor 
Petrie at the Ramesseum and exchanged the news of fresh 
finds. Sometimes I took a holiday from the remote and 



ATHENS AND EGYPT 315 

swarming past, and with a horse in place of the demurer 
donkey, went far out into the desert on the other side 
of the Nile. Pebbles and soft sand, hard sand and rocks 
succeeded each other in slope and level, and the horse 
whinnied as he sniffed the utter emptiness of the un- 
breathed air. One kite hung, a remote speck in the brazen 
sky, and the silence and the solitude wove the unutterable 
spell of the desert. There, out of sight of all that makes 
the planet habitable, your horse alone made the link with 
the ephemeral living world; all else was as it had been 
through uncounted centuries, and as it would remain 
for centuries to come, until the spinning earth grew still. 
In the desert the past and the future are one, and the 
present, dwindled to a microscopical point, is but a 
shadow of time in the timeless circle of eternity. Old 
wicked Egypt was no more than that ; the dynasties were 
whisked away like an unquiet fly, that persists for a 
little, but not for long. 

Luxor would be full of southerly-going dahabeahs and 
English tourists during this month of January, and I 
can see Maggie waving her long fine-fingered hands in 
impotent despair, as I brought her an invitation from 
some friend that she and I would dine on one of these 
dahabeahs to-night or next night or the night after. 
"How am I to get on with my work," exclaimed this out- 
raged invalid, "with all these interruptions? Won't it 
do, if we ask them to tea at the temple?" That certainly 
usually "did" quite well, for while Maggie was making 
tea, the cry of "Antica!" would arise from the diggers, 
and she popped the lid on the teapot, and we turned to 
see what had been unearthed. Once it was the statue of 
the Rameses of the Exodus, which would tremendously 
excite the visitor, but left us cold, for he was already 



316 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

plentifully represented. Or it might be a scribe of the 
eighteenth dynasty whom to-day you may see in the 
museum at Gizeh, and better even than that was a superb 
Saite head, such as I may behold at this moment if I 
raise my eyes from the page, or best of all it was the 
image of Sen-mut himself, to see which, again, you must 
go to Gizeh. That was the crown and culmination of 
the digging and worthy of an archaeological digression. 

Sen-mut, we knew, was the architect of our temple, and 
of the temple of Deir-el-Bahari across the river, and the 
mysterious thing in connection with him was that wher- 
ever his name and his deeds appeared in hieroglyphic 
inscriptions they had always been defaced, and an in- 
scription about King Thothmes III, nephew and successor 
of Queen Hatasoo, to whose reign the activities of Sen- 
mut belonged had been superimposed. Sometimes the 
deletion was not quite thorough and you could read Sen- 
mut' s name below some dull chronicle of King Thothmes. 
What the reason for these erasures had been was hitherto 
only conjecture: now, on the close of this bright January 
afternoon the riddle was solved, and we found ourselves 
the accidental recoverers of a scandal nearly four thou- 
sand years old. For Sen-mut was but a common man, 
"not mentioned in writing" (i.e. with no ancestral rec- 
ords), and he speaking from the inscription on the back 
of this statue of himself which he had dedicated told us 
that, "I filled the heart of the Queen (Hatasoo) in very 
truth gaining the heart of my mistress daily . . . and the 
mistress of the two lands (Upper and Lower Egypt) was 
pleased with that which came forth from my mouth, the 
Priest of Truth, Sen-mut. I knew her comings in the 
Royal house, and was beloved of the ruler" 

Here then was the reason for all these erasures: there 



ATHENS AND EGYPT 317 

had been a scandal about the intimacy between this "com- 
mon man" and the Queen; so, when she died, and her 
nephew succeeded, he caused all mention of Sen-mut to 
be erased, and covered up the blank spaces with majestic 
records of his own achievements. It was his design to 
destroy all evidence of this disreputable or at least un- 
dignified affair, and hammer and chisel, at his order, were 
busy to delete all hint of Aunt Hatasoo's indiscretions. 
Pious King Thothmes was all but successful in this piece 
of family pride: only just one record escaped his erasing 
hand. But now, four thousand years later, Maggie dug 
up that solitary omission. 

I know that there must have been clouds on these 
halcyon days of winter, but they passed and prevailing 
sunlight was dominant again. Once Maggie got a chill 
as she lingered by the horse-shoe lake, and developed a 
congestion of the lungs, but when she was allowed to 
leave her bed again and go out, she was carried in a sort 
of litter, by her own express decree, to the beloved exca- 
vation again, and made a delighted progress round the 
fresh clearing, ordering that some mason must be at once 
employed in piecing together the huge lion-headed statues 
which had been discovered in the fore-court of the temple, 
and in setting them in place again. She was more dubious 
about certain abominable baboons that crouched in a 
small chamber within the temple, whose awful ugliness 
seemed better left alone. . . . Then over us both passed 
the cloud of slightly disquieting letters from my mother. 
My father was overtired, and Would go on working: he 
had attacks of breathlessness if he rode, a sense of op- 
pression on his chest that was not mitigated by his remedy 
of thumping it. But no one, least of all the sufferer, took 
these things at all seriously, Maggie got better, my 



318 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

father received no alarming report from his doctor, and 
my mother, as these clouds seemed to melt, added them 
to her general list of the workings of "unreasonable fear," 
that ghostly enemy of hers, whom she was for ever com- 
bating and holding at arm's length, but never quite 
slaying. 

Arthur, during these Grseco-Egyptian years, had slid 
into the groove of a career; he was a house-master at 
Eton, prosperous and popular, though from time to time 
his own cloud beset him, and out of it he would an- 
nounce that the burden of his work was quite intolerable, 
and that he could not possibly stand it for another term. 
But this was a fruitful Jeremiad, for it relieved his mind, 
and he buckled to with renewed energy and that amazing 
gift of getting through a task more quickly than anybody 
else could have done it, without the slightest loss of thor- 
oughness, and he added to the work that was incident to 
his profession an immense literary activity of his own, 
producing several volumes of verse, and experimentaliz- 
ing in those meditative essays in which before long he 
found his own particular metier. Hugh, in the same way, 
after studying at Llandaff under Dean Vaughan, had 
taken orders in the English Church and was attached to 
the Eton Mission at Hackney Wick, so that of the three 
sons I was the only one who had not settled down to any 
career. By this time archseology, as a scholastic profes- 
sion, was already closed to me, for Cambridge could not 
go on giving me grants indefinitely, and in order to crown 
my days of classical learning with a final failure, King's 
had not decorated with a fellowship either the work I 
sent in on the Roman occupation of Chester, or on certain 
aspects of the cult of Asclepios. So, in deference to my 
father's wishes, I took the first step towards getting a 



ATHENS AND EGYPT 319 

post in the Education Office, collected and sent in testi- 
monials, and craved employment there as an inspector 
or examiner, I forget which. This regularized matters: 
that was a respectable employment, and by sending in 
those testimonials I was doing my best to be respectably 
employed, and pending appointment I could go on writ- 
ing, thus treading the path that by now I fully meant to 
pursue. At no time was it definitely agreed that I should 
become anything so irregular as a writer of novels, and 
I suppose that if I had been appointed to a post in the 
Education Office, I should have taken it up. But those 
in whose hands the appointment rested thought that the 
author of Dodo would be a very indifferent educator, in 
spite of these brilliant panegyrics from his tutors, and 
for aught I know those testimonials are dustily filed there 
still. 

But neither Arthur nor Hugh thought of their present 
vocations in their present form as their lives' work; 
Arthur, at any rate, had not the slightest intention, as 
events proved, of plucking the rewards which his pro- 
fession as schoolmaster was soon to offer him, and when 
headmasterships came within his reach he did not put his 
hand out to them. Hugh's case was only a little differ- 
ent; the direct service of God was now his choice and 
his passion, but as evolution of that progressed in him, it 
took him out of the English Church altogether. No one 
ever questioned that his joining the Roman communion 
and taking orders there was anything but a matter of ir- 
resistible conviction with him, but what would have hap- 
pened had that conviction taken hold on him before my 
father's death it is impossible to say. I cannot imagine 
any human relation, any pietas restraining Hugh when he 
had the firm belief that it was by divine guidance that 



320 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

he so acted : on the other hand I cannot imagine what the 
effect on my father would have been; whether he could 
have beaten down his own will in the matter, as my 
mother did, and have accepted this without reserve at 
all, or whether it would have been to him, as the death 
of Martin had been, an event unadjustable, unbridgable, 
unintelligible, a blow without reason, to be submitted to 
in a silence which, had it been broken, must have been re- 
solved into bewildered protest. 

Apart from their present professions both Arthur and 
Hugh were moving towards the pursuit, that of author- 
ship, which was soon to take at least equal rank with their 
other work. Within ten years it was as an essayist, a 
writer of delicate meditative prose that Arthur was most 
widely known, and to this he devoted the flower of his 
energy, while Hugh served his Church not as a parish 
priest, but as preacher and as writer of propagandist 
novels, novels with the purpose of showing the dealings 
of God through His Church. As works of art his sermons 
far transcended his books, an opinion which no one I think 
who ever listened to that tumultuous eloquence could 
doubt. They carried his untrammelled message; while 
he preached, he could say with supreme instinctive art all 
that in novel-writing he had more indirectly to convey: 
his sermons had an overwhelming sincerity which made 
the delivery of them flawless and flame-like. When 
he wrote he was never quite so inspired : the message was 
the same, but it had to be wrapt about with the allegory 
of ordinary life, he had to convey it in terms of country 
houses or historical episode, and the sermon which was 
the underlying intention was often a handicap to the art 
of story-telling. But it was towards his books that his 



ATHENS AND EGYPT 321 

inclination tended; his joy of achievement lay in the 
written, not in the spoken word. 

Then came the closing summer of this period, after 
which the whole stage and manner of life was altered 
altogether. That year I had stayed late in the south, 
going on from Athens to Capri, and laying the foundation 
then of that Italian castle of dreams, which was after- 
wards to take a more solid form. Maggie had supple- 
mented Egypt with a cure at Aix-les-Bains, but in August 
we were all together again at Addington, and once more, 
as before Nellie's death, and never since then, there were 
hundreds of small cones on the cedar that scattered the 
sulphur-like powder. Arthur came there before he went 
to Scotland, Hugh had a holiday release from the Eton 
mission, Maggie was established there deep in the colla- 
tion of the results from the digging at Luxor. Soon my 
father and mother were to start on a tour through Ire- 
land, and when September saw their departure, Maggie 
and I stayed on for a little and then drifted off on differ- 
ent visits. We were all free to stop at home if we liked, 
and ask friends there; Addington was just an ark for any 
wandering family doves, picnicky as my mother said, but 
there it was. . . Maggie and I saw my father and mother 
off, and as from my first remembered days and ever after- 
wards when he wished "good night" or "good bye," he 
kissed me, and said, "God bless you, and make you a good 
boy always." Then, after he got into the carriage, he 
waved his hands with some affectionate and despairing 
gesture, saying, "I can't bear leaving you nice people 
here," and the carriage turned, and went up the slope in 
front of the house. A very few days afterwards, Maggie 
and I went off on our ways, leaving Beth at the front 
door, saying, "Eh, pray-a-do come back soon." 



322 OUR FAMILY AFFAIRS 

I had trysted with a friend to spend a few days at Ad- 
dington early in October, and arrived there to find a 
letter from him that he was prevented, and I was in two 
minds as to whether to stop here alone, or go off on 
some other visit for the Sunday. That scarcely seemed 
worth while, for I had learned that my father and mother 
were leaving Ireland that day, and would spend the Sun- 
day with Mr. Gladstone at Hawarden. The Irish tour 
therefore was over, and they would be back on Monday. 
Beth and I talked about it, and she said, "Nay, don't you 
go away to-day, you be here for when your Papa and 
Mamma get back. Have a quiet Sunday, you and me." 

It was arranged so: and after lunch on Sunday I went 
out for a long walk through the myriad paths of the Park, 
where the beeches were russeting and the squirrels gather- 
ing the nuts, and came home in time to have tea with 
Beth. There was a telegram for me on the-hall-table, and 
glancing at the sender's name first I saw it was from Mrs. 
Gladstone. 

"Your father passed over quite peacefully this morn- 
ing," it said. "Can you come with Maggie?" 

I did not comprehend at first what it meant. My 
father was a very bad sailor, and it was quite possible 
that Mrs. Gladstone had merely telegraphed the little 
news that he was comfortably back in England. For one 
or two or three long seconds which seemed like hours, 
I tried to think that this was what she meant. But then 
my father had crossed not "this morning" but on Friday : 
and why should I "come with Maggie" ? I suppose that 
the comprehension of the real meaning of this message 
was only a matter of a moment, and I think the envelope 
of the telegram was scarcely crumpled up in my hand be- 
fore I knew. Just then, Beth, having seen my entry from 



ATHENS AND EGYPT 323 

the window of her room, came down to tell me that she 
had got tea ready. And she saw that something had hap- 
pened, for her hands made a nuivering motion, and then 
were clasped. 

"Is there any trouble*?" she asked. 

I could get up to London that night, but not to Chester. 
I slept in the Euston Hotel and went on by an early train 
next morning. 

My father and mother had arrived at Hawarden on 
Saturday: he was very well and in tremendously good 
spirits, and sat up late that night talking with Mr. Glad- 
stone. They had all gone to early communion on Sun- 
day morning, returned for breakfast, and walked again 
to church for the eleven o'clock service. Mrs. Gladstone 
and they were in a pew together, and during the Confes- 
sion, my father sank back from his upright kneeling, and 
did no more than sigh. ... He bowed himself before 
his Lord, as he met Him face to face. . . . 



INDEX 



Addington, Easter holidays at, 
179 
last family gathering at, 321 
liberty and leisure at, 251 
non-ecclesiastical ritual at, 

102 
Sunday routine at, 183 
Aix-les-Bains, Maggie Benson 

at, 321 
Algeria, a tour in, 276 
Algiers, visits to, 254, 276 
"American nouns" and how 

played, 93 
Anderson, Mary, a tribute to, 

235 
author's meeting with, 235 

Archaeological researches in 
Greece and Egypt, et seq., 
286 
studies at Cambridge, 255 
Athens, a representation of the 
Duchess of Bayswater at, 
301 
author in, 279, 303 
royalty at a theatrical per- 
formance in, 304. 
Athleticism, benefits of, 149 

Babe, B.A., The, 301, 302 
Bambridge, Mr., as pianist, 145 
his part in a performance of 



Haydn's Toy Symphony, 
201 
Beaconsfield, Lord, offers 
Bishopric of Truro to au- 
thor's father, 62 
Beesly, A. H., classics master 
at Marlborough, 155 
obiter dicta of, 160 
Benson, Arthur Christopher, 
(brother), 22 
a mystical "Chapter" and its 

warden, 99 
a nursery reminiscence of, 25 
and his brother Hugh, 128 
as actor: a hilarious kitchen- 
maid, 177 
as author, 178, 320 
as butterfly collector, 95 
at Eton, 87, 123, 251 
contributes a poem to Cam- 
bridge Fortnightly, 231 
gains an Eton scholarship at 

King's, 126 
holiday activities of, 92 
house-master at Eton, 318 
piscatorial exploits of, 54 
schooldays at East Sheen, 30 
Benson, E. F., a fellowship ex- 
amination at Eton, 114 
a first in the Classical 
Tripos, 245 



325 



326 



INDEX 



Benson, E. F. — 

a fit of demoniacal posses- 
sion, 59 

a (neglected) untrained fac- 
ulty for visualizing, 143 

a ride with Gladstone, 271 

a squirrel at prayers, 23 

a trip to Switzerland, 129 

an attack of jaundice, 209 

an instance of his fatal habit 
of inversion, 28 

and his brother Hugh, 
128 

and the food question at 
school, 83 

applies for post in Education 
Office, 319 

archaeological studies at 
Cambridge : an inspiring 
tutor, 255 

at Marlborough, 137, 196 

attends children's parties at 
White Lodge, Richmond 
Park, 86 

"Benson's lies," 86 et seq. 

"Beth" on his want of tact, 
107 

birth of, 13 

birthday celebrations at 
Rugby, 32 

Bishop Wordsworth's gift to, 

52 

boredom of Sundays at Ad- 
dington, 183 

botanical studies in Corn- 
wall, 64 

butterfly and moth collect- 
ing, 146 



Benson, E. F. — 

Chester, archaeological ex- 
ploration at, 266 

childhood days: impressions 
of, 13 et seq. 

climbs the Matterhorn, 241 

compulsory study in Swit- 
zerland, 135 

conducts Haydn's Toy Sym- 
phony, 201 

confirmation at Marlborough, 
163 

Cornwall, a new home in, 
62 et seq. 

curricula at Lincoln, 40 

cycles with "O. B.," 222 

death of his brother Martin, 
78 

death of his sister Nellie, 
252 

disquieting letters from his 
mother, 252, 317 

Dodo, publication of, 292 

edits The Marlburian, 194 

Empress Frederick and, 
284 

enjoyments during a foggy 
Christmas, 175 

excavations at Megalopolis, 
288 

fails in a scholarship exam- 
ination, 1 25 

father appointed Archbishop 
of Canterbury, 163 

first view of the Parthenon, 
279 

first visit to Crystal Palace, 
ill 



INDEX 



327 



Benson, E. F. — 

friendship with Regie Lister, 
305 et seq. , 

games and school matches at 
Marlborough, 203 

Greece, the spell of, 308 

hide-and-seek at Lincoln, 35 

his father, 13, 42, 62, 102 
{see also Benson, Edward 
White) 

his mother, 18 et seq., 27, 
29, 40, 58, 61, 102, 106 
{see also Benson, Mrs.) 

holidays in the Lake Dis- 
trict, 209 

hoop-bowling at Marl- 
borough, 200 

in Algiers, 254, 276, 277 

in Athens, 279 et seq^ 303 
et seq. 

in Egypt, 254 

influence of A. H. Beesly on, 
155 et seq. 

journeys to Truro for open- 
ing of Cathedral, 235 

lacks effective ambition, 123 

Lambeth and Addington, 163 
et seq. 

lean years at school, 108 et 
seq. 

learns to swim, 56 

liberty and leisure at Ad- 
dington, 251 

Lincoln, reminiscences of, 52 
et seq. 

love of music, 58, 68, 112, 
152 

lure of the mountains, 130 



Benson, E. F. — 

meets Mary Anderson, 

235 

Mrs. Gladstone's telegram 

, announcing death of his 
father, 322 

natural history studies of, 
65, 66, 96 

parental encouragement of 
hobbies, 57 

poetical efforts of, 93, 121 

Pontresina, a trip to, and his 
brother Hugh, 263 

private schooldays, and holi- 
days, 80 et seq. 

Reeve, the Rev. J. A., a pen 
picture of, 73 

revisits Marlborough, 235 

Rubicon, The, published, and 
adverse critiques, 296 et 
seq. 

scholarships at King's, 230, 
263 

schooldays at East Sheen, 
80, 108, 114 

schoolfellows expelled, 89 

"Sieges — the most dangerous 
game since the world be- 
gan," 39 

Sketches from Marlborough, 
publication of, 232 

Sundays at Lincoln and at 
Addington, 46, 183 

Swiss mountain-climbing, 41 
et seq. 

the charm of the sea, 56 

the passing-bell at Marl- 
borough, 209 



328 



INDEX 



Benson, E. F. — 

the tragedy of a stickleback, 
67 

tours Normandy and Brit- 
tany, 244 

Turkish delight, midnight 
revels, and the sequel, 115 
et seq. 

Wellington and the begin- 
ning, 13 et seq. 

widening horizons of, 147 et 
seq. 

wins a foundation scholar- 
ship, 145 
Benson, Edward White (fa- 
ther), a wet holiday in the 
Lake District, 209 

accompanies author to Marl- 
borough, 137 

Algerian tours of, 254, 276, 
277 

and his son Hugh, 127 

and Robert Browning, 237 

and the erection of Truro 
Cathedral, 101 

and the Lincoln judgment, 
250, 253 

appointed Bishop of Truro, 
62 

as picture-hanger, 25 

becomes Archbishop of Can- 
terbury, 163 

Chancellor of Lincoln, 32 

death of his eldest son, 78 

dinner parties at Lambeth 
Palace, 237 

Easter visits to Florence, 
181 



Benson, Edward White (fa- 
ther) — 

frequent fits of depression, 
103, 105, 180 

headmaster of Wellington 
College, 13 

his death at Hawarden 
Church, 322 

his dislike of tobacco, 238 

his sternness, and the cause, 

403 
holiday "leisure" of, 132, 

133, 210, 278 
last farewell to his children, 

321 
love of the classics, 181 
Press reviews of The Rubi- 
con, and, 300 
Queen Victoria and, 277 
relentless Sundays of, 183 
tour through Ireland, 321 
visits Carthage, 278 
Benson, Maggie (sister), 22, 

25, 54, 127, 178, 275 
conducts excavations of a 

Karnak temple, 312, 315 
develops congestion of the 

lungs in Egypt, 317 
guinea-pig rearing by, 93 
her Venture of Rational 

Faith, 314 
ill-health of, 312 
in Athens, 303 
prizes at Truro High School, 

127 
publishes Subject to Vanity, 

3H 
researches in Chemistry, 94 



INDEX 



329 



Benson, Maggie (sister) 

trips to Algiers and to 
Egypt, 254, 276 
Benson Martin (brother), 22, 
23. 25, 30 

at Winchester, 124 

death of, 78 

precocity of, 75 
Benson, Mrs. (mother), a 
stanza by, 94 

and her children, 40, 106, 
167 

at Addington, 179 

death of, 254 

death of her daughter Nellie, 
252 

fear as her enemy, 173, 318 

friendship with Mr. Glad- 
stone, 165 

her subscriptions as "honor- 
ary member," 99, 100 

how she whiled away a wet 
afternoon, 212 

informs author of the Dodo 
"boom," 294 

letters to "Beth" on illness 
and death of her son Mar- 
tin, 76, 77 

religious instincts of, 78, 102, 
168, 175 

smokes a pipe on the Alps, 
240 
Benson, Nellie (sister), 22, 65, 
98, 99, 251 

an article in Temple Bar by, 
177 

an attack of pleurodynia, 209 

and her father, 105 



Benson, Nellie (sister) 

ascends the Zienal Rothhorn, 

2 43 

at Truro High School, 126 

Bishop Wordsworth and, 52 

death of, 252 

distributes prizes at Marl- 
borough, 206 
Benson, Robert Hugh (broth- 
er), a mountain climb — 1 
and the sequel, 264 

a play by, 177 

as henchman to a mystical 
"Chapter," 99 

as preacher, 320 

at Cambridge, 250 

attached to Eton Mission, 
Hackney Wick, 318 

"Beth" and, 211 

childish piety of, 101 

early journalistic efforts of, 

93 

family caricatures by, 210 

his father and, 127 

joins the Roman church, 102, 

319 

lays a stone for erection of 

Truro Cathedral, 101 
propagandist novels by, 320 
skating in a fog, 176 
studies at Llandaff, 318 
takes orders, 102 
wins a scholarship at Eton, 
210 
Berne, a day and night at, 129 
"Beth" {see Cooper, Eliza- 
beth) 
Bird's-nesting in Cornwall, 65 



330 



INDEX 



Biskra, a Royal bereavement: 

news received at, 277 
Bosanquet, R. Carr, 226 
Bramston, Miss, as authoress, 

41, 42 
in Cornwall, 76 
Braun, Miss, 75 
"Brewing" at Marlborough : 

function describ d, 140 
Browning, Oscar, 45, 221 et 

seq. 
contributes a poem to Cam," 

bridge Fortnightly, 231 
his At-Homes at Cambridge, 

224 
Browning, Robert, author's 

meeting with, 237 
Bubb, Mr., Clerk of Works of 

Truro Cathedral, 101 
Burton, Willie, 60, 61 
Butterflies and moths, holiday 

collection of, 95, 146 

Calverley, Charles Stuart, 259 

Cambridge Fortnightly, the, 
232 

Cambridge University: author 
at, 213 et seq. 
King's College, 213 

Canterbury, Archbishop of (see 
Benson, Edward White) 

Capri, a visit to, 321 

Carter, Mrs., organist of Ken- 
wyn Church: a boyish 
romance, 68 

Carthage, a visit to, 278 

Cathedral, the first post- 
Reformation, 100 



"Chapter," a mystical, 99 

Chemistry, holiday researches 
in, 94 

Chester, archaeological research- 
es at, 267 

"Chitchat" literary society, 226 

Clarence, Duke of, and "O. B.," 
death of, 222, 276 

Constantine, Crown Prince of 
Greece (afterwards King 
"Tino"), 283 

Cooper, Elizabeth ("Beth"), 
15, 18, 22, 33, 36, 38, 42, 
74, 96, 107, 128, 321, 
322 
and Hugh Benson, 18, 127 
and the Archbishop, 221 
games at Addington, 251 
her love for Mrs. Benson, 

211 
Mrs. Benson's letter an- 
nouncing illness and death 
of Martin, 77. 78 

Copeland, May, 60 

Cornwall, the charms of, 62 

Crawford, Lady, entertains 
Archbishop and Mrs. Ben- 
son 180 

Crystal Palace, the, first visit 
to, 111 

Cunningham, Dr., a story of, 
228 

Daily Chronicle, the, an un- 
favourable review of The 
Rubicon in, 299 

Decemviri Debating Society, 
the, 229 



INDEX 



331 



Deir-el-Bahari, archaeological 

explorations at, 310, 314 
Delphi, French excavations at, 

289 
Dickinson, G. Lowes, 231 
Dodo, Lucas Malet's frank let- 
ters on, 291 
publication of, 292 
read by Mrs. Benson and by 

Henry James, 272 
the infancy of, 178 
Dorpfeld, Dr., and Miss Mag- 
gie Benson, 303 
and the fourth century Greek 
theatres, 288 
Duchess of Bayszvater, a repre- 
sentation of, in Athens, 

304 

Easedale Rectory, a wet holi- 
day in, 209 

East Sheen, author's schooldays 
at, 80 et seq. 

Edgar, Mr., headmaster of 
Temple Grove School, 114 
a bad report from, 117 

Edhem Pasha, 281 

Egerton, Sir Edwin, 285 

and Miss Maggie Benson, 

'3°3 
as host, 308 

Egypt, visits to, 254, 308 

Epidaurusj a visit to, 289 

Eton, a second failure for 

scholarship at, 125 
Arthur Benson at, 87, 124, 

250, 318 
Etretat, holidays at, 86 



Fal, the, bathing in, 100 

Ford, Lionel, headmaster of 
Harrow, 226 

Frederick, Empress, and au- 
thor, 284 

Friendships of schoolboys, how 
made and how retained, 

151 
Fry, Roger, and the Cambridge 
Fortnightly, 231 

Geoghehan, Mr., fourth form 
master at East Sheen 
school, 83 

George V (then Duke of York) 
dines at Lambeth Palace, 
238 
(then Prince of Wales) and 
the death of the Duke of 
Clarence, 277 

George, King of Greece, 281 
an audience with, 282 
and his sister's hat, 288 

George, Prince (of Greece), 
284 

Germany, Crown Princess of, 
and Oscar Browning, 
222 

Giles, Mrs., her day-school and 
the scholars, 41, 60 

Gimmelwald, arrival at, 133 

Gladstone, Mrs., a fateful tele- 
gram from, 322 

Gladstone, Right Hon. W. E., 
a dissertation on blotting- 
paper squeezes, 267 
and the Chester archaeological 
researches, 261 



332 



INDEX 



Gladstone, Right Hon. W. 
E.— 

friendship with Mrs. Benson, 
166 
Golf on the snow and in a fog, 

176 
Goodhart, Arthur, at King's 

College, 226 
Greece, the Court of, 283 
author in, 286 et seq. 
the spell of, 308 
Greek theatres, German theory 

regarding, 286 
Guinea-pigs reared by Maggie 
Benson, 93, 94 

Halsbury, Lord, at Lambeth 

Palace, 167 
Handel Festival at Crystal 

Palace, 110, 113 
Hare, Thomas, 86 
Harrison, Mrs. ("Lucas 

Malet"), reads Dodo, 290 
Hatasoo, Queen, and Sen-mut, 

316 
Hawarden, author interviews 

Mr. Gladstone at, 267 
Gladstone's tribute to Mrs. 

Benson at, 166 
Hawarden Church, tragic death 

of the Archbishop in, 

323 
Headlam, Walter, at King's 

College, 226 
Henry VI, and King's College, 

Cambridge, 213 
Hobbie_s as a preservative of 

youth, 58 



Image in the Sand, The, 31 1 
Irish tour of the Archbishop 

and Mrs. Benson, 321 
Irving, Harry, recitations at 
Marlborough Penny Read- 
ings, 202 

James, Henry, earlier and later 
works of, 272 
reads Dodo, 272 
James, Monty, Provost of 
Eton, as mimic, 226, 229 
readings from Dickens by, 
229 
Jungfrau, the, an ascent of, in 
thick snow, 249 
first glimpse of, 130 

Karnak, excavations in the 

temple of Mut, 312 
Kenwyn Church and its or- 
ganist, 72 
Kenwyn Vicarage, 63 
King Dr., Bishop of Lincoln, 

trial of, 250 
King's College, Cambridge, a 
notable life-fellow of, 221 
eccentric, Fellows of, 214 et 

seq. 
glee-singing at, 217 
life at, 226 et seq. 
the chapel, 233 

Lake district, the, a wet holi- 
day in, 209 

Lambeth Palace, dinner parties 
at, 237 
Mrs. Benson as hostess at, 164 

Leigh, Augustus Austen, Vice- 
Provost of King's, 216 



INDEX 



333 



Lincoln and earlv emotions, 32 
et seq. 

and demoniacal possession, 
52 et seq. 

Sundays at, 45 

the Cathedral, 45 et seq. 

trial, the, Archbishop Ben- 
son and, 249, 253 
Lister, Regie, and a theatrical 
performance in Athens, 

304 
author and, 306 

his genius for friendship, 305 

Llandaff, Hugh Benson at, 

3i8 

Luxor, a stay at, 310 
Lyttelton, Alfred, the secret of 
his popularity, 305 

"Malet, Lucas" {see Harrison, 

Mrs.) 
Mann, Dr., 234 
Marie, Princess (of Greece), 

284 
Markham, Admiral, and a the- 
atrical performance in 
Athens, 304 
Marlborough College, an in- 
dulgent house-master, 194 
author at, 137 
author promoted to sixth 

form, 190 
life at, 138 

Penny Readings at, 201 
the racket-court, 158 
unsuccessful scholarship ex- 
amination at, 125 
Marlburian, the, 199 



Mary, Princess, Duchess of 
Teck, a children's party at 
White Lodge, 86 

Matterhorn, ascent of: a peril- 
ous descent, 241 

Megalopolis, archaeological ex- 
cavations at, 288 

Middleton, Professor, and his 
love of archaeology, 255 et 
seq. 

Miles, Eustace, a hoop-bowling 
run with author, 200 
a unique alliance with au- 
thor, 196 
his aptitude for study, 243 

Mill, John Stuart, 86 

Mommsen, Professor, and the 
Chester archaeological re- 
searches, 267 

Mountain-climbing, 131, 241 et 
seq. 

Murren, lawn tennis at, 134 

Mycenae, a visit to, 289 

Myers, F. W., an original verse 
by — and a parody, 261 

Naville, M., his explorations 
at Deir-el-Bahari, 313 

Newberry, Mr., and the Kar- 
nak excavations, 313 

Nicholas, Prince (of Greece), 
284 

Nixon, J. E., Latin prose lec- 
turer, 216, 231 et seq. 

Nocton expeditions to, 55 

"O. B." (see Browning, Oscar) 
Okes, Dr., Provost of King's, 
217 



334 



INDEX 



Olga, Queen, 283 
and Dodo, 304 
Olympia visited by author, 289 

Pain, Barry, his parody in 
Cambridge Fortnightly, 
231 
Pall Mall Gazette reviews au- 
thor's Rubicon, 297 
Pan-Anglican conference at 

Lambeth : a story of, 239 
Parker, butler at Truro, 127 
Parody and parodists, 260 
Penny Readings at Marl- 
borough, 201 
Perran, picnics at, 100 
Petrie, Professor, visits to, 314 
Pharsala, battle of: Edhem 

Pasha's epigram of, 281 
Photography, first efforts at, 95 
"Pirates"— the game described, 

96 
Pitt Club, Cambridge Univer- 
sity, 226 
Piz Palu, a horrible experience 

on the, 263 
Poetry, author's early efforts in, 

93» 121 

"Poetry games," 93 

Pontresina, an unpleasant ad- 
venture at, 263 

Press-cuttings, unfavourable, 
297 

Printing press, a primitive, 94 

Prior, Mr., of East Sheen 
school, 83 

Racket Court, Marlborough 
College, 161 



Rawlings, Mr., first form teach- 
er at East Sheen school, 

83 
Reeve, Rev. J. A., reminiscences 

of, 73 

Riffel-Alp, climbing : a perilous 

descent, 241 
Riseholme, enjoyable days at, 

53 
Rotten Row, exercise in, 164 
Rubicon, The, publication of: 

Press reviews, 296 
Russell, Mrs., author's music- 
teacher, and a tribute to, 
80, ill 

St. James's Budget and The 
Rubicon, 299 

St. Mary's Church, Truro, 100 

St. Paul's Cathedral, Passion 
music at, 112 

Saturday Magazine, the, 56, 92, 
176 
a Swiss edition of, 243 

Savernake Forest, butterfly col- 
lecting in, 146 

Schil thorn, the ascent of, 134 

Sen-mut, Egyptian architect, 
316 

Sermon paper, a new use for, 

92, 177 
Sharpe, Mr., objects to hoop- 
bowling, 200 
Sidgwick, Arthur (uncle), 30 
Sidgwick, Henry (uncle), an 
astronomical poem by, 

93 

visits Wellington, 30 



INDEX 



835 



Sidgwick, Mrs., 18, 30 
Sidgwick, William (uncle), 

30 
Skating under difficulties, 176 
Skegness, a visit to, 56 
Standard the, a review of au- 
thor's Rubicon, 297 
Staunton Prize, the, conditions 

of, 146 
Stephen, J. K., as parodist, 257 
death of, 263- 
inaugurates the "T. A. F.," 

328 
personality of, 259 
Sundays at Addington, 183 

at Lincoln, 44 
Switzerland, holidays in, 129 

"T. A. F.," the, at Cambridge, 
229 

Tait, Lucy, a tour in Algeria, 
276 
her devotion to Mrs. Benson, 
254 

Teck, Duchess of {see Mary, 
Princess) 

Teck, Duke of, a cigar and a 
squib, 86 

Temple, Bishop (afterwards 
Archbishop of Canter- 
bury), 56 

Tennant, Miss Margot, 266 

Tennyson, Alfred Lord, at 
Lambeth Palace, 238 

Thothmes, King, and the tem- 
ple hieroglyphic inscrip- 
tions, 316 

Thun, lake of, 130 



Tobogganing under difficulties, 

175 
Torquay, summer holidays at, 

Toswill, Mr., a zealous Alpin- 
ist, 240 

"Trojan Queen's Revenge, 
The," and its author, 156 

Truro, author's father ap- 
pointed Bishop of, 62 
erection of the Cathedral at, 
100 

Truro Cathedral, opening of, 

2 35 
Tuck, Mrs., 75 

Vanity Fair reviews The Rubi- 
con, 297 

Vaughan, Dean, of LlandarT, 
3i8 

Victoria, Queen, and the Arch- 
bishop's Algerian tour, 277 
and the see of Truro, 62 

Vintage, The, how and where 
written, 311 

Voltaire, M., French master at 
East Sheen, 80, 83 

Waldstein, Dr., 255 

Waterfield, Ottiwell, and his 
private school at East 
Sheen, 80 et seq. 
as elocutionist, 80, 109 

Waterfield, Mrs., 110, ill 

Wellington College, and its 
headmaster, 13 
the dining-room, 23 

Westminster, Duke of, an inter- 
view with, 266 



336 



INDEX 



White Lodge, Richmond Park, 
children's parties at, 86 

Wilde, Oscar, a tale of, 300 

Wordsworth, Bishop, of Lin- 
coln, 52 

Wordsworth, Mrs., and family, 
52 



Wordsworth, William, Jim 
Stephen's parodies of, 260 

World, The, on The Rubicon, 
307 

Zienal Rothhorn, the, au- 
thor's ascent of, 243 



BRENTANO'S 



